in a couple weeks, little bear will be receiving his mmr vaccine. while the amount of vaccines he receives makes me nervous, i read a lot about it, which made me feel a bit better. and so i have dutifully taken him in to receive his shots on schedule. but the mmr gives me pause.

i received the mmr as an adult because it was a university requirement. as far as i know, i’ve never had a reaction to a vaccine aside from a sore arm. not so for the mmr. in addition to some of the side effects i was aware of – such as feeling like crap – i had a horrific headache for almost a week. and i was in my 20s. i hate to think what it’s going to make my baby feel like.

so i went in search of some specific information about this vaccine. my first stop was pharyngula, as he usually offers up some pretty reassuring science. instead, the first post i found was about sending readers off to vote in a poll about vaccines and austism. many of the commenters were being complete assholes, and, honestly, i value the opinions of the parents voting in the poll more than a bunch of angry nerds. the parents are people who witnessed first-hand what vaccines seemed to do to their kids. are these parents wrong? i guess probably, but when your child gets a shot then deteriorates within a couple weeks of said shot… well, i’m not an idiot, but i’d probably blame the shot, too. that’s one of the things that bugs me about the science side: they make fun of these people and say things like, “most people get vaccinated and most people like ice cream, so vaccines make you like ice cream.” that’s not really comparable. for one thing, it seems like most autism parents claim that their child got a shot, then changed fairly soon afterward. for another, the autism rate did seem to go way up after the new vaccine schedule (5 shots at a time every three months) was introduced. to make stupid generalizations is just snotty and counterproductive. could the rate have gone up because the screening process is better? sure, i’m completely willing to believe that. that’s probably the case. however, i do find it a bit worrying that it’s possible that giving babies so many vaccines could be harming them.

so, after my initial experience with that topic on that site – messing with poll results is way scientific, right? – i decided to skip blogs and laypeople and try to find studies specific to the mmr. i’m not having a lot of luck. many of the studies i see are like this one, which is about vaccines in the first year. the mmr isn’t given in the first year, so that doesn’t really help. and when people want to see a study that includes children who were never vaccinated, this quote from a 1999 study gets thrown around a lot: “There was no difference in age at diagnosis [of autism] between the cases vaccinated before or after 18 months of age and those never vaccinated.” well, there wouldn’t be. children are usually diagnosed between the ages of 2 and 4, and there’s a reason there’s such a wide range. autism is a spectrum disorder that presents differently depending on severity. and you have people who were born with it and people who regress. i think this is because autism isn’t just one disease/syndrome, and therefore doesn’t have just one cause. there is almost certainly a genetic component, and this is especially obvious in children who have the symptoms from birth. but the children who lose language skills between the ages of 1-3? couldn’t the cause in their cases be environmental? or maybe something genetic touched off by environmental factors? going back to that quote, if autism is genetic – or certain types are genetic – then you’ll have unvaccinated kids on the autism spectrum as well. but the timing of their diagnosis has more to do with doctor cooperation and parental awareness than when their symptoms presented. and if a parent notices her child regressing after a vaccine, and the doctor doesn’t agree with her, chances are very good that her child will not receive an official diagnosis until much later. like maybe when that child enters preschool with the autistic unvaccinated kid who also gets diagnosed at that time.

anyway, i’m going to keep trying to find information on the mmr, because i really do want him to stay safe from these diseases. but in closing, i’d like to tell some of these people to get the sticks out of their asses and have some fucking compassion. you’re more annoying than the conspiracy theorists. it’s not like i’m saying dinosaurs didn’t exist or there’s a sky wizard or anything. i just want to be sure that my first and only baby doesn’t develop a mysterious and debilitating illness that could ruin his life. (and, let’s face it, our lives, too.) especially when it’s as easy as not giving him a shot.

this was a good month for little bear. he started walking for real just a day after he turned 10 months. he started waving and still does the sign for “milk” off and on. (he’s too shy to wave at strangers, like in the grocery store, but i don’t want to push him too much. mama knows what it’s like to be shy.) he’s great at standing and can pretty much get where he’s going without falling down when he walks. his vocabulary is mostly limited to “dada,” “dad,” “mama,” “mum,” and “dog” though he has said “no” (and “oh no!”) and “hi” a couple times. he babbles a lot and does that “baby jargoning” thing where it sounds like he’s talking in his own language, with little inflections and stuff. he still isn’t great with eye contact, but since he’s doing well otherwise, i think it’s less of a red flag and more mimicking mama, who also has issues with eye contact.

he loves playing “peek-a-boo” these days, mainly while i’m changing him. i’ll give him the new diaper while i’m changing the old one, and he’ll cover his face with it while i ask, “where’s [little bear]?” then he’ll peek over it with this big grin and i’ll say, “there he is! peek-a-boo!” over and over until he gets tired of it or i worry that he’s about to pee everywhere. he likes to dance, too. when he likes music that’s playing, he’ll kind of hop/bounce up and down, and sometimes move his arms around. the other day, he started keeping time by slapping his thigh with the beat. i think he’s going to have decent rhythm like his parents. he loves to drum on things, so we’re already thinking about getting him some kind of drum set when he’s a bit older. (probably the pad type to start with.)

he’s such a cool little guy. he’s less of a baby every day, and it’s getting kind of hard for me to deal with. i mean, i’m excited to watch him grow up and see what he’s becoming, but he’s definitely more of a toddler than baby. and the next milestone entry will be one year! if i can, i’m going to try to sum up his first year. it’s been pretty exciting!

little bear waved for the first time today. unassisted, i mean. he’s always amazing me… his father was on the way out the door to work, and he and i waved goodbye like always, and i went to help little bear wave, but he did it himself!

and he started drinking from a straw early last month, but sunday was the first time grandma saw it. we went out to lunch with her and he got his own little cup and starting sipping from it, and she was very impressed. i thought it was pretty cool, too. we always get him a cup of water at restaurants now, because it keeps him occupied. he still hates sippy cups, and he’ll take a few sips from a regular cup, but then throws it on the floor. maybe i should see if i can find bpa-free straws somewhere and just let him drink that way until he quits throwing his drinks around.

his first tooth is still slowly working its way out. i’d heard that once you can feel it, it just pops right up. unfortunately for little bear, not so much. the one next to it looks like it’s about ready to surface, too. i get to enjoy his gummy bear smile for just a bit longer, i guess, as his existing tooth is just peeking a bit from his gum. still, it seems excruciating for him. i don’t know why things have to be so difficult for him, poor kid.

a cute thing he does now is come to us with books. he’ll toddle up and hand me a book, then wait to be picked up and put in my lap. and i read to him every. single. time. i’m just glad he likes reading so much. (it used to be, he’d only come up to say “hi” or let me know he had a dirty diaper. that’s pretty funny, too, though. “hey, mama, i seem to have made a bit of a mess here. what are we going to do about it?” grandma thinks that since he want his diaper changed immediately after soiling it, maybe he’ll be easier to potty train.) he also has to have goodnight moon read to him every night, at least once. the routine was supposed to be, daddy reads that and kisses for daddy, then mama comes in and reads blues clues bedtime or whatever it’s called. but for the past couple of nights, he makes me read goodnight moon instead. and when his daddy reads it to him, he always points at the mouse when he gets to that page. i don’t know why he loves that book so much, but the day we bought it, he wouldn’t let it go and carried it through the store and held it on the way home.

he’s always had a real personality, but it’s starting to become obvious to everyone else. he’s just doing so much these days. and though he can be difficult in some ways, because he’s so stubborn, on the whole, he’s a very sweet, pleasant baby. he usually smiles at people when we go out, and he’s very affectionate with us. sometimes he comes up and randomly rests his head in my lap or gives me raspberries or holds my hand. he babbles away in his sweet little voice and i pay close attention, cheering when something intelligible comes out, and babbling back when nothing does.

well, i just about choked to death on my frozen lemonade just now, and woke the poor little guy, so i have to sign off for now. i love this little person so much. he’s a great baby.

little bear has been amazing me lately. for one thing, he’s so mobile. and fast! he’s a handful, but it’s fun watching him tool around.

we also know that he’s a total water baby now. he’s always loved baths, but he loves pools and the beach, too. we took him to the beach twice, a couple weeks ago. the only thing he didn’t care for was sand. but that’s okay because mama doesn’t much care for it, either. when we held him so he floated on his back, he started falling asleep. he didn’t even mind getting splashed in the face the couple times the waves got him. then we took him to a pool party that weekend, and he loved it. he kicks and splashes and everything. he still isn’t great at putting his face in the water, and after a couple of coughing episodes, just tended to be very tentative about it after that.

wow. he just stood at the window for almost a minute. without holding onto anything, i mean. he’s doing it again. just standing there… he’ll be doing that all the time soon. and probably walking on his own, too. the other day he let go of the couch to chase brumby, realized he wasn’t holding the couch anymore, and promptly fell on his butt.

he shakes his head “no” all the time now. he does it to tell us he’s not interested or doesn’t want something, mostly. like when he doesn’t want to eat or when he’s ready to leave somewhere or stop doing something. i think he’s also doing it to sass me. when i tell him to get away from something or put it down, he does as he’s told most of the time. but sometimes he just shakes his head. i’m not sure if it’s because he knows i’m telling him “no” or if he’s telling me “no.” seems like the latter.

a couple mornings ago, he came up with a new game he loves to play. he’ll raspberry his daddy on his shoulder, then start laughing. (i filmed it and will get it off my camera and upload it soon.) sometimes he’ll raspberry a toy or just make the noise on his own and bust out laughing.

he’s a great kid. i love him so, so much. and it’s so cool watching him grow up.

my little bear continues to grow… a common piece of advice has been to enjoy his being a baby while it lasts, and that’s something i’ve tried hard to do. it’s still going too fast. it’s exciting to watch him go from being a helpless little newborn to an ever more autonomous baby, but there are already things i miss. when he was tiny, it was so much easier to let him sleep on my chest. he still can, kind of, but he’s so heavy. i can still hold him with one arm when he falls asleep on me, and i know i’m going to miss when he won’t fit.

this month has been about the same as last month, except he’s doing everything faster and less clumsily. he walks holding onto furniture and his walker toy, though still can’t let go to move to a different place. he can’t stand for more than a few seconds on his own, but he’s working on it. he shakes his head “no” when he doesn’t like what we’re doing or if he’s had enough to eat. (he also pushes the spoon away as if to say, “i am so done with this, mama.”) i gave him his own spoon to practice with at mealtime, and he tries to put it in the container, but mostly just bangs it on the tray and sticks it in his mouth.

i think he said his first word on the 3rd. he went up to brumby, put his hand on him and said, “dog.” when i asked him if he said dog, he turned back to brumby and said it a couple more times. now he does it almost every time he sees the dog. we went to the beach on sunday to visit grandma and she had her dog there. it is a huge dog, way different-looking than brumby, and he kept saying “dog” at her, too. he’s been saying ma-ma, da-da, etc. for a while now, but it seemed a little too indiscriminate to be his first word. he says “da-da,” “da-dee,” and “daddd” all the time, even when his father’s not around. and he’s been saying “ma-ma” or “mummmm” when he’s upset for a long time. but now he pretty much just says “dog” when he sees a dog. he said “beh” to his bear once, but since he only did it once, i think it was a coincidence. today i was watching rugrats while he played on the floor and i said, “hey, little bear, look at the baby!” and he looked up and mimicked “ba-by.” on the changing table, when i sing “la-la-la” to him, sometimes he does it back, and we go back and forth a bit. it’s the most conversational i’ve ever seen him.

he also started playing with us this month. we roll the ball back and forth when he’s in the mood for it. (most of the time, we only get a couple passes in before he’s off to explore something else. he already has a.d.d.) he also plays keep away with brumby. they play tug of war with his bone toy and stuff. thankfully, brumby is a pretty laid-back dog, but we keep a close eye regardless. little bear is still pretty friendly with other people. in general, this kid knows no fear. when we were at the beach on sunday, he loved it. a couple of waves got him in the face, and he didn’t care. he just kicked and splashed and had a great time. he loves swimming in the pool, too. it’s so neat getting to watch him try new things and have so much fun. (including trying and loving jalapeno ranch dressing. that stuff is almost too hot for mama, but he loves it…)

he’s also been honing his temper tantrum skills. it is very obvious these days when he hasn’t had enough sleep or it’s time for a nap. and if you take something away before he’s done with it, watch out! thankfully, the tantrum doesn’t last too long when that happens…

so that’s pretty much what little bear’s been up to these days. he’s fussing right now, so i guess i’d better see if he needs a nap. (and don’t even ask about the crib sleeping. we were close, but no cigar.)

at our d&d night on saturday, one of our friends kept giving little bear the thumbs up sign. at one point, little bear shook his head at him. so he did it again and he shook his head again. i’d seen him doing that before, but it had seemed kind of random. but he really seemed to be telling our friend that he was having none of it. then on sunday morning, sohei got little bear to mimic him shaking his head. it was so funny.

yesterday, i had to drive with sohei to the tire store so he wouldn’t have to wait around there. he wanted to go home and play his video game, but i kidnapped him and took us to toys r us instead. i’d promised little bear a push/walker toy, and he was going to get that toy! and his daddy was going to spend time with him! so this morning he’s playing with his new toy, and he figured out how to put the plastic letters in the mail compartment. he just opened the door and popped the letter in. then he opened the bottom door and took it out.

i don’t know if it’s ridiculous to be so impressed with all the things he does, but he just amazes me all the time. i didn’t think that, at eight months, he’d be able to tell us “no” even as erratically as he does it. and i didn’t think he’d be able to figure out how to play with the toy yet, beyond pushing it around the room. it’s kind of hard to be losing my baby, but it’s exciting to watch him grow up.

i’ve been tweeting the stuff little bear’s doing, but have been negligent about posting it here. which will make me sad later when it’s not archived here, i bet… so, he’s been up to a lot recently. some days, he goes on these babbling streaks and just jabbers non-stop. he even has these little inflections sometimes like he’s having a conversation. he never really talks to me, though. just his toys and himself, mostly. he smiles at me a lot, though. and he’s also been giving me baby kisses. he’ll hold my face and i can see his little face coming right at me, mouth open, then… kiss! it’s just about the cutest thing ever. he’s crawling really fast now and pulling himself to standing on everything. he’ll kinda cruise, shuffling along while holding furniture. he hasn’t really let go yet to go to a different piece, but he’s getting there. he also played ball with sohei today. the sat on the floor and rolled a ball back and forth. he doesn’t have the patience to play long, though. he’s more interested in exploring. i also noticed that when he stands up, he lets himself down very carefully, which is a relief. i vaguely remember my sister just kind of throwing herself down on the floor every time. and, as i typed that, he fell and hit his head on the glass coffee table.

this month, little bear hit a lot of milestones. (i guess he was just gearing up for it last month.) he really started babbling, for one thing. he says ma-ma, da-da, ga-ga, and ba-ba. a lot. he also sat up on his own on 4/14, and does that pretty much constantly. then on 4/19, he started crawling. he used his potty chair for the first time on 4/26, which isn’t really a milestone, but it was kind of cool. (we haven’t had a lot of success since, though there’s plenty of time for that.) and while he’s been pulling to standing for a while, now he does it constantly. he practices standing all the time. sometimes he can stand on his own for a few seconds. he pulls himself up on sohei and i, and the furniture, etc.

i can’t believe how much he’s grown in the past month. he’s getting more autonomous every day. i love watching him learn and grow, but it’s making me sad that he’s not going to be my baby much longer. it doesn’t seem that long ago that he couldn’t do much of anything, and now he plays on his own and explores his nursery and stuff. and now he’s trying to explore his diaper pail so i’d better sign off.

am i being too cavalier about posting little bear’s images online? i try to limit pics/videos to things that won’t embarrass him later, and all his videos on youtube are private. the trend of uploading video of kids crying or falling down or other such situations is kind of upsetting to me. i don’t want to be that parent. maybe i shouldn’t be posting anything until he’s old enough to consent? mainly i do it because my friends like to see pictures of him. and i could email the pictures, but if i sent an email to everyone every time i wanted to share a picture, it would border on spam. if it’s on facebook, it’s as easy as scrolling past it if you’re not in the mood to look. i dunno… i just don’t want him to be upset with me later…

on friday, little bear and i went to work with sohei, like we do every other week. he showed grandpa how good he is at babbling and crawling. then we went to ikea afterward, which i don’t do nearly enough. (my dream is to live in a tiny condo – preferably on the beach – completely done in ikea stuff, even the kitchen and bathroom.) anyway, we didn’t get the entertainment center we’d gone to find, but we did get a ton of stuff for little bear. he got a new toy box, barnslig rug to play on, bead toy, lamb puppet, giant kangaroo, potty chair, and this box that keeps your power strip and cords all together and locked up, so he won’t kill himself. anytime we go somewhere to buy something and they have kids products, we end up buying him so many things…

on saturday, we cleaned and babyproofed his nursery thoroughly. he should be safe even on his own in there, though i’m still not 100% okay leaving him by himself. it nice and safe, with all his little books available for him, and the plugs all covered, and a rug where he hopefully won’t scratch his knees up. he can get in his toybox and get his stuff out, and it’s made of cloth so he probably can’t hurt himself if it falls over on him. it’s nice that he has a room of his own, now that he can get around and appreciate it.

and he actually used his potty chair today. we tried it this morning for the first time, but he seemed kind of scared of it. this afternoon, after his nap, we tried it again and he went pee. when he does good things, i praise him, and he usually loves it. but when i praised him when he peed, he stopped. so i had to shut up so he could finish. (there would be a smiley there, but they’re not working again for some reason.) i don’t expect to potty train him or anything, but i figured it’s good for him to know where he’s supposed to go, and that it feels better than a wet diaper. not going to pressure him, but hopefully he’ll be less confused when it is time to train.

anyway, he needs to eat. his favorite food is pears (followed closely by carrots), so i got him some pear with blueberry to try. i’m finding gerber’s organic selection isn’t all that extensive, so i’m getting a food processor soon to make his food myself. then he can have pears with just about anything. nom!

jeeze, my kid is growing up fast. he started sitting up on his own a few days ago, and now he’s crawling. i can’t leave him alone for a minute or he’s getting into something… i think i’m going to be spending this week and the coming weekend doing a major clean and baby-proofing everything. he just amazes me. just last week, i could leave him on the bed and make a quick trip to the bathroom or sort laundry. not anymore! i went to look out the window today, and when i turned around, he was already inches from falling off the bed. it’s so cool getting to watch him grow.

a game that little bear likes is when i say my version of the “no more monkeys” rhyme while bouncing him. usually, i hold him around the waist and say, “[little bear] fell down and bonked his head.” when i say “bonked” i gently touch foreheads with him, which always makes him smile. well, today i guess he decided that he wanted to be the one to do the forehead touch and full-on headbutted me when we got to that part. he’s fine, so it was pretty hilarious.

he’s also been doing raspberries on me. he’s always doing it on his own, and he loves it when i do it to his tummy. but lately he figured out he can do it on me, too, so instead of just nomming me, he raspberries as well.

and, lastly for cute things he does… this morning we were all laying in bed and he climbed over and nestled his head on my chest and curled up next to me for a cuddle. he usually just climbs around on me, but i guess he was feeling affectionate this morning.

in case you missed my tweet, little bear pulled himself to sitting today! he’s also playing in his crib with only minor fussing. i think he forgot how traumatized he was by the sleep training. let’s hope this keeps up.

i’m starting to feel some mama guilt about little bear’s sleep habits. and his reliance on me in general. i did not set out to make him into a mama’s boy, but he still screams when i try to put him in his crib, and does not like to spend an extended amount of time with his dad. i still like co-sleeping, but i’m afraid we’re making bad habits worse. he has a really hard time falling asleep if he’s not nursing, but i’m working on letting him put himself to sleep.

i’ve found that a lot of the time, he just does stuff when he’s ready. like with breastfeeding. he just would not do it for like two months, then one day he suddenly decided that he wanted to. (and then would not take a bottle at all, go figure.) no amount of fighting him or coaxing him does any good. he’s clearly like his mother in this regard. the more you push, the more stubborn and inflexible he gets. he did this with sitting in the playpen, too. so i’m hoping that one day he’ll just decide that he’s okay with his crib. and that he’s okay falling asleep without nursing himself there. (when he gets teeth, i’m going to have to stop that no matter what. i don’t want him getting tooth decay from having milk on his teeth all night.)

it’s so frustrating. i try so hard to do right by my baby, but i worry that i’m stunting him. i want him to be independent. i really, truly do not want him to have to rely on me for everything. i know he’s a baby and does rely on me right now, but even for a baby he needs me an awful lot. i don’t mind being there for him, but if he can’t do some stuff on his own, he’s just not going to move forward. as it is, he doesn’t do stuff i know he can do, like rolling over. he just cries until i do it for him.

i guess i’m just going to have to do my best here. maybe when he’s old enough to be reasoned with, we can work on his dependence issues if he still has them. it was explained to me once, with the dog, that i was actually hurting him by letting him have his way all the time and letting him be alpha dog. because it’s too much responsibility for a small dog to feel he has to look out for a whole household and stuff. that he needs discipline and structure, etc. and while my baby is not a dog, i worry that i’m hurting him by being too kind. it will be tough on him if he has to get up early for preschool in the morning, but can’t put himself to sleep or stay asleep on his own. he’ll be tired every day. at the same time, i know what i said before is true. you just cannot push this kid, or he’ll fight back, and the process will take longer than it would if you just let him do stuff when he’s ready. i guess i just worry that there are some things where he won’t ever be ready on his own, and i have to push to move him forward.

so last night little bear had enough tics in a row that i could have probably filmed it, if i’d had my camera with me. (i quit carrying around because i gave up on trying to record it.) he went right back to playing when he was done, so i am still inclined to think it’s something other than a seizure.

and then, when i took him upstairs for the night, he babbled for about an hour (da-da-da… ga?) and almost sat up on his own. which also made me feel better. for the past couple days, he’s been so close to sitting up. he’ll pull himself up, then either overshoot and fall on his back, or not be able to quite get on his butt. any day now…

i took little bear to the doctor today. he feels the fussiness is probably due to teething, as he has two teeth about to pop out on the bottom. he also thinks the reflux is an issue again. i asked about little bear’s weird movements, and he said that reflux can actually cause stuff like that, too. he agreed that if it were seizure activity, i’d probably have been able to film it by now because of how long they usually occur, and that he’d be zoning out when it happens. he doesn’t really roll his eyes back or anything, and is responsive right after, so it probably isn’t anything serious. sohei said it was a waste of money to take him, but not for me, because i feel a little more reassured now.

i read an article the other night about behaviors similar to infantile spasms (seizures), and what he does sounds more like that. no one knows what causes the pseudo-seizures – some speculate that it’s a primitive masturbatory thing! – but they seem to be harmless. (the real seizures can cause death and generally cause mental retardation, but i guess the fake ones don’t.) anyway, unless he gets to the point where the spells last long enough for me to film them, and he starts zoning out, i’m just going to quit worrying about it. i can deal with tics and even tourette’s and stuff, but anything that could potentially be fatal? not so much.

little bear and i went to the bookstore today to get a book for his seven month birthday. (who am i kidding? we usually go there and get him a book every couple weeks. i’m an addict. and he can start getting library books when he stops trying to eat them.) it’s hard to believe that he’s closer to being a year old than he is to being born.

i don’t think he hit any new milestones this month. he’s pretty much perfected his sitting and usually catches himself before he falls all the way over. (unless he’s having one of his “spells” where he arches his back and throws himself backward.) he still pulls himself to standing and can stay there a bit before falling down, as long as he holds onto whatever he pulled up on. as for language, he kind of stopped saying da-da and the like for some reason. (i’m about to take him to the doctor, because in addition to his spells/tics, he doesn’t even try to babble anymore, and he’s been really fussy for the past couple weeks.) he doesn’t crawl yet, but when he’s on his hands and knees, he sort of scootches backward. so i’m betting he may start crawling in the next month or so. and over the weekend, when we were playing pat-a-cake – which consists of me doing the motions while he sits with his hands curled in his lap – when i held my hands up, he put his hands on mine. he has a ways to go with that, but it was pretty cute. grandpa said maybe little bear isn’t progressing as quickly as he was because he’s stopping to make sure he’s got what he does know, down. i probably woudn’t worry as much if it weren’t for the moodiness and weird movements. [edit] oops, i also forgot to mention that he’s getting better at drinking out of a non-sippy cup and can actually do it by himself sometimes. he’ll get a couple of sips, and spills the rest, usually. i’m sure he’ll be able to at least use a sippy by the time i wean him.

anyway, despite the fussiness, i still really like staying home with him. he is a very sweet baby. i just think something’s bothering him is all. it may be teething, because though we haven’t seen any evidence of teeth, they’re still burrowing their way up through his poor little gums. he’s also nowhere near sleeping on his own, but i’m not even going there…

i’m watching my baby sleep. i love my son so much i can hardly stand it. his hair, which i hate so much on myself, looks so beautiful on him. it’s blond and brown and a little red. it goes perfectly with his ephemeral green-grey-brown eyes. he looks so autumnal. his little cheeks are round and pale and smooth, and cool to the touch. his long lashes look dark in comparison to his skin. i love his little button nose, and his sweet mouth, and how he smiles his big, toothless grin at me. and his little stick-out ears that i’d hoped he’d have are just adorable. his voice warms my heart, and his giggles make it melt. but his cries absolutely break it. he’s sweet and inquisitive and friendly and clingy (or, more flatteringly, affectionate). i feel so lucky to have such a great little boy.

i’m getting kind of worried about little bear. he’s almost seven months old, and he seems to have stalled developmentally. he was kind of ahead until 5-6 months, then slowed down. he almost never uses consonants anymore, so he doesn’t really babble. he makes noise, like screeching and oohing, and he still laughs and smiles. he was saying da-da a bit, but doesn’t really do that now. he sits up well if you put him that way, but doesn’t seem anywhere near pulling himself into sitting on his own. he’s not making much progress with his crawling, either. he just falls flat on his stomach. i know babies all develop differently, but this just doesn’t seem normal for him.

the seizure thing is starting to worry me a lot, too. he still seems to kind of flail backwards, but when i try to put him on his back to see if he keeps doing it, he gets upset, so i can’t tell if it’s a spasm or he’s just freaking out. he does this thing with his head, too, where it suddenly drops. i thought he was headbutting me because he doesn’t have perfect control of his head/neck yet, but except for the weird head-bob, his control seems fine. i’m going to try to record him doing it at some point and show it to his doctor. i’m hoping i can capture it soon, because i’d like him to be able to see it, rather than having to try to explain it. it’s not that i think he won’t believe me, but i’ve heard this is really hard to diagnose. unfortunately, it’ll be hard for me to get on film, too, because he’ll do it a couple times, stop, then do it again later. and sohei probably won’t help because he always thinks i’m crazy. if i can’t record him doing it within the next couple days, i’ll make him an appointment anyway, because it’s important to catch it early.

i hope i am just being crazy and worrying over nothing, because a seizure disorder in an infant almost never has a good prognosis.

we went to little bear’s six month well baby visit today. he got his vaccines, and spent the morning rather warm and sleeping. now he’s playing in his fun jungle and jumping up and down and screaming his head off. so i reckon it’s safe to say he’s back to normal.

at the appointment, i asked a ton of questions, like regarding teething and eating habits. everything’s checking out pretty well. though little bear can’t pull himself to sitting, when we sit him up, he’s apparently a champion sitter. (he doesn’t prop himself up with his arms or anything.) and the lack of consonant-vowel babbling (da-da-da, etc.) isn’t cause for concern yet, either, as he is making all kinds of sounds and does occasionally blurt “da” or “ga.” the doctor noticed little bear look up at sohei when he was about to use the stethoscope. he pointed out that this is a good step in development for babies. i’d never really thought much about it, but he did that last time we were at the store and someone talked to him. he raises his little eyebrows as if to say, “is this okay, mama?” so apparently that’s a good developmental direction. go little bear!

his height (28 inches, 88%) and weight (17 lb 13 oz, 48%) were considered fine, though the percentiles were a bit down from last time. his head circumference went up (17.25 inches, 44%), so i’m not sure what to make of that. if a baby’s head grows rapidly starting at 6 months, it can be an indicator of autism, but i’m not sure this constitutes rapid growth. i’ll start panicking if his next measurement is markedly higher or something. (i also read the other day that autistic babies prefer playing with hard objects vs. cuddly toys, and i kind of freaked out because omg his favorite toy is the remote control! must stop reading about autism.)

the only thing that might be cause for concern is this weird thing he started doing while we were in orlando over the weekend. we were at a restaurant and he kept throwing himself back in his high chair and putting his arms up. i thought it looked weird, so i asked about it, and the doctor said if he does it again, change his position and see if he keeps doing it. if he does, it could be a sign of seizure activity. but he said he thinks it’s probably harmless.

so, this month he’s perfected his sitting, started saying consonant-vowel combos like “da,” and pulled himself to standing a couple times. he’s getting to be such a big boy!

well, little bear is just slightly ahead in the photo contest in his category. i’m a little embarrassed at how much i want him to win. this has been a good lesson, though, in that i don’t think i’ll enter him into any more contests. competitiveness is not my thing. (still, go little bear!)

okay, i read this thread on the baby board i frequent, and i have to bitch. if you’ve done this, or know someone has, i apologize for being nasty, but i. must. rant. (let me put it this way: if you let the tv babysit your six month old, please just stop reading now.)

yes! sitting your baby in a bumbo in front of the tv while you have your “me time” is a shitty thing to do! if your baby is “high maintenance” that’s no excuse. (newsflash: babies are “high maintenance” creatures.) i have about the most high maintenance baby ev-ar and the only time he watches tv is when he’s with his negligent father while i’m cooking or cleaning. (his dad at least holds him while he’s playing his stupid video games, but i’d still much rather he’d put the fucking controller down and read to the boy.) i’m not a goddamn saint, but i somehow make it through the day without ditching him. even if that means holding and entertaining him from the time sohei leaves until he gets home nearly 12 hours later, and having to do the housework and stuff while his father keeps an eye on him. i don’t get “me time.” (unless you count the ten or so minutes i get in the shower every other day.) if i sound pissed about that, it has more to do with sohei than it does little bear. he’s a baby and he needs someone to care for him. i’m not going to lose my shit or snap (at little bear) because i don’t get any time to myself. most of the time, i really like spending time with him. but no matter how tired i am, i still feel that i’m better company for him than the tv.

that isn’t to say i’ll never let him watch tv ever. when i get back from megacon, i’m going to order some baby signing dvds from the library that i’ll watch with him. (i want to learn some songs and stuff, because i’m not entirely sure i’m doing it right.) and when he’s a bit older, i’ll let him watch tv and movies by himself. but he’s six months old. he won’t be this reliant on me forever, and i realize that. so i’ll spend as much time with him as he needs me to. besides, in about six months, i’ll be going back to work, and i don’t want to regret not spending more time with him.

i guess part of the reason this pissed me off so badly was that i’ve been alone with little bear since thursday, and aside from some time in his fun jungle, he’s pretty much been with me 24-7. (and i stay in the room with him when he’s in that, because he’s not supposed to be unsupervised in it. i work on sohei’s anniversary present while he plays.) and there have been plenty of times when sohei does stuff with his dad after work, while i stay home with the baby. want to know the last time i got to do something without little bear? when i went to the skinny puppy concert in november. (oh, except for a trip to the grocery store.) for whatever reason, sohei refuses to ask his mum to babysit, and i had to ask the two times we’ve had her do it before, and i’m getting kind of embarrassed about having to ask. so, yeah, i think i’m pretty badly in need of some goddamn “me time” and i still don’t resort to plopping him down in front of the tv. and no, you aren’t teaching baby to “entertain himself.” the tv is entertaining him. if you’re that intent on teaching him to entertain himself, put him on the floor or in the playpen with his toys, or put him in an exersaucer or something. oh, but then you might actually have to watch him.

anyway, little bear is up now, so i’ll leave off here. let me just say this: it’s crap to let the tv babysit your infant, and if you’re going to insist on doing it, don’t make dumbass excuses like it’s teaching him something. you’re doing it because you’re lazy. you can teach your baby way better than the tv can, and if you want him to learn independence, teaching him to rely on the tv ain’t gonna do it. kthxbai.

sohei went out of town thursday-sunday, so it’s been me and little bear and brumby. it’s been going alright, though i’m overtired now and can’t sleep. he’s been pretty good, though, especially considering his teething. unfortunately, i’ve had to leave him in his crib a few times to do things like shower and go to the bathroom, and he screams and cries every time. i refuse to do cry it out on purpose, but sohei is going to start pushing it soon – like probably when he gets back. i’ve been doing a lot of research to try and figure out if there’s an alternative or anything. i tried the sleep training thing where i sit next to him the whole time, but it seems to have made things worse. and then i read all this awful stuff about crying it out, and now i’m even more sure i don’t want to do it. apparently the baby stops crying and goes to sleep because the experience was so traumatic to him. and when he eventually gives up crying altogether, it’s because he’s given up on receiving comfort from his parents. i’ll come right out and say it: i can’t handle that shit.

today, after i got out of the bathroom, i went and retrieved my crying baby from his crib and sat him down next to me on the bed. he looked up at me, his face still red, tears running down his cheeks, lip quivering. then he buried his face in my arm and hugged me. and not just the arms thrown around me thing he does when i carry him, but actually clutching me. i picked him up and cuddled him until he felt better. his tiny hug melted my heart. as far as i’m concerned, if it’s that important to him, i don’t see why he can’t just keep sleeping with us. he clearly hates his crib and hates being alone. it’s not like he’s going to be doing this for five years. i should just tell sohei that little bear and i took a vote and it’s 2-1 for him staying. even if his vote is only .5, we still win. seriously, though, i don’t know what to do. sohei has the right to sleep the way he wants, but little bear and i have that right, too. and, to be fair, i do my best to keep the baby from waking him. most mornings, sohei can’t even remember little bear waking him at all. i just don’t know what to do about this. separate beds are no good, either, because i hate sleeping without sohei… i have a feeling he’s going to get his way. but the idea of little bear feeling like he can’t rely on me is killing me.

anyway, in other news… ever since i started feeding little bear solids – about a month ago – he’s been trying to take the spoon and do it himself. a lot of the time, he’s more willing to take what’s on the spoon if he puts it in his own mouth. so, against the advice of the book, i let him help. well, tonight, he damn near fed himself. i would fill the spoon and move it towards him, then he’d grab it and slurp the rice cereal right off. he’s so independent. at christmas, he was opening his own presents. we’d pull a strip of paper off, and he’d finish it by himself. he also wants to drink out of a glass. he sees me drink, then reaches out for it. sometimes, if i’m drinking water and there’s just a bit left, i hand him the glass. he can hold it in both hands and put it to his mouth, but he hasn’t mastered tipping it back yet. when i tip it for him, he struggles against me, as if to say, “i can do it myself, ma!” and when the water actually reaches his mouth with my help, it seems to weird him out. this stuff isn’t milk! what the hell? still, he’s always willing to try. why he’s independent about everything but sleeping, i don’t know…

i really need to try to sleep, so i’m going to leave off here. i’ll do his six months post sometime this weekend, hopefully.

and, in what was another rich, full day for little bear… i was reading his new book, where is spot?, and asked him if he saw the dog. to which he replied by saying what sounded a whole lot like “dog.” (at first, i thought he was just saying “da” all the time since we liked it so much, but when he tries to say “dog” it sound more like “daw” than “daa.” if that makes any sense.)

then, during his bath, he apparently pulled himself to standing in the tub. i usually bathe him but of course sohei was today. and i didn’t really see him do it the other day because he was holding on to my back. my baby is growing up tooooo fast!

well, the photo contest is over at midnight, and i doubt the numbers will change much, so here are the results:

Best Friends: 1st (on to the finals!)
Daddy and Me: 2nd (lost to a pic of a boy peeing on his dad )
Best Hair: 5th
Best Newborn: 3rd
Best Smile: 2nd

so i’m actually a little psyched that he’s going on to the second round in one category. isn’t it funny how you don’t really care about winning until you’re actually about to?

little bear’s been saying, “mummmm” when he’s upset for a while now, but i figured it’s random. and he says, “da” sometimes in the morning when sohei’s getting ready for work. i didn’t really think it was directed at him, because he tends to make a lot of sounds when he first wakes up. but today, i’m pretty darn sure he meant it. sohei was turned over in bed, watching tv, and little bear rolled over on his side and reached out to him, and went, “da-da.” and i was like, “omg, [sohei], turn over and acknowledge him! he was talking to you!” he also tried to climb me this morning, which isn’t all that unusual. what was different today was, sohei said he was pulling himself to standing. (using the straps on my nursing tank top as grips, of course. ) he tries to do that a lot, but he actually succeeded today, apparently. (he was climbing my back, so i couldn’t see it.) i can’t believe how fast he’s growing. what a neat baby!

i’ve been doing some “sleep training” with little bear this week and it’s not going well. i put him in his crib every day for his afternoon nap, and sit down on the floor next to him and pat him and sing to him and stuff. i’ve tried just leaving him in there by himself and he screams. i’ve tried sitting in the recliner in the corner, and he cries until i pick him up. so this week i’m trying it this way. crying it out doesn’t work for this kid, even if i wanted to do it, and i don’t. my stomach issues haven’t been as bad as they were pre-baby, but i still have flare-ups which require me to leave him in his crib sometimes. he fusses the second i put him down. i turn on his mobile and pat him and leave. then he starts crying, but i’m sick, so i can’t go pick him up. the crying turns to screaming and it does. not. stop. he just screams until i can come back for him, and then it takes a while to console him.

so leaving him to cry it out just isn’t an option. besides, it just feels wrong. when i come in, he raises his little tear-stained face to look at me, as if to say, “mama, why did you not come for me?” honestly, though, i don’t know what to do. he cries even when i’m sitting right there. the whole point of me sitting next to him was so he could relax and sleep. we do this for an hour every day and not once has he even come close to sleeping. he just cries. i don’t pick him up or anything, i just pat him and sing and stuff, but it doesn’t help. he just gets louder. i guess we’re kind of doing cry it out, but i’m there so he doesn’t feel abandoned. i’m not sure if this is a good idea, though, because a) it’s not doing any good and b) i’m afraid he’s going to start hating me.

i would be fine with letting him continue to co-sleep except that as he gets more mobile, it’s getting more dangerous. he burrows under the covers now and likes to pull them up over his face. when i’m awake, i just pull them off, but when i’m asleep it about gives me a heart attack to wake up to him like that. he also likes to bury his face in our pillows. i sleep really lightly when he’s there, because i can’t relax and i’m always keeping watch. (one time, sohei almost accidentally put his arm over little bear, and – in my sleep – i caught his arm and pushed it away.) when sohei takes him downstairs with him some weekend mornings, i sleep completely differently. so deeply, in fact, that when i wake up, i panic because i worry that i might have rolled on little bear or something.

so, yeah, i’m at a loss with this sleep training thing. i’m going to keep doing it because everything i read says that if you give up, it’ll just confuse him. i think it’s just going to take a long time…

also, he’s always very interested in what people around him do, and wants to emulate them. so we’ve been working on cup training. he watches me drink and reaches out for the cup. i hand it to him and he takes it and puts it to his mouth. but then he doesn’t know what to do with it. usually, he gets frustrated and tips it over, spilling the water down his front. (it’s only a small amount, at least.) it’s so cute watching him try, though.

well, he’s fussing, so i’d better sign off. i swear he has a.d.d.

in a move i’m sure i’ll regret, i entered little bear into a photo contest. in five categories, actually. (if you want to see how he’s faring, the results are here:

http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2153990-best_friends_3#results
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2154018-daddy#results
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2154046-best_hair#results
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2154088-best_newborn_picture#results
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2154162-best_smile#results

round one will be over on monday.)

i was afraid that no one would vote for him and i’d feel awful, but he has at least one vote in each category, so i feel a lot better now. even if he doesn’t win, at least he got votes. and no, none of them are mine. we’re not allowed to vote for our own babies. i did this on a whim, and i don’t think i’ll be doing it again, no matter the results… but… go little bear!

little bear has been making his toys interact recently, which i find really fascinating for some reason. right now, he’s in his fun jungle exersaucer, and he’s making the dragonfly “dive bomb” the iguana, causing the iguana to start lighting up and singing. the iguana interests him anyway, as i’ve seen him smack it like he wanted it to shut up, and kiss it when it wouldn’t come on. but i’ve never seen him use another toy to activate it, and i just think that’s neat.

i really, really love being a mum. even though we were trying for a baby – on purpose and everything – i was still a little scared i wouldn’t be able to handle it. but i’m so happy to have little bear. i love him so much. he can be trouble sometimes, like when he refuses to sleep or let me put him down so i can get work done. but on the whole, he’s a sweet, pleasant little fellow.

this past month, his main accomplishment was being able to sit for a while on his own. he can’t sit up by himself, but when pulled to sitting, he can pretty much stay there. sometimes he pulls himself forward onto his hands and knees, but no real crawling yet. and sometimes, he still falls to the side or his back. he’ll be six months old on 3/5, and i’m kind of hoping to see some real babbling by then. (ga-ga-ga, etc.) he still makes noises with his tongue, does long strings of vowels sounds, and does “mmm” and “bbb” sorts of sounds. but no strings of vowel-consonant sounds yet.

he’s also excellent at reaching. he’ll grab for anything in reach – and move forward to get at things that aren’t – and put it in his mouth. he fusses when we take toys away, too. (and fussing is putting it politely.) some of his favorite objects to grab are remote controls and video game controllers. he is his father’s son…

i’m not in a hurry to see him grow up, and i feel like he’s pretty much on track. he does everything on the doctor’s checklist, anyway. he’s still hit-or-miss when responding to his name, but he’s getting better, i think, so no worries.

crying babies used to irritate me. now they break my heart. (and not just when it’s my baby crying.) i think there’s something wrong with me.

(also, there’s no benjury at the moment, thankfully. that’s just what i say to him when he cries. i’m a mean mama. )

i wrote this earlier, but forgot to post for some reason, so i’ll add some stuff about his doctor appointment at the end.

he hasn’t learned anything new this month, per se, but continues to work on his existing skills. once pulled to sitting, he can sit on his own for a short time. (usually under a minute, at this point.) he continues to get more cheerful as his digestive system matures. it’s really neat watching him grow. he’s enjoying his christmas toys a lot, and i’m hoping the fun jungle will help teach him to do things like stand. not much of an update, i know, but he’s plugging along. and still sleeping in our bed.

his four month doctor visit went well. we had to postpone it for a week because he got his first cold. it was very minor, but we all thought it best to wait til he felt better. he got a clean bill of health, and has been doing alright after his vaccinations. though today he’s had some minor diarrhea. hopefully it stays minor. he took his first shot very well, while being distracted by a toy, but no toy could stop him screaming during the second. this kid really hates shots… the tears stopped soon after though, and i gave him a quick cuddle before we left. he was 27 inches (putting him in the 95th percentile for height) and 15 lb 8 oz (53rd? percentile for weight). he’s getting to be such a big boy.

i love my boy so much it’s overwhelming sometimes. i feel so lucky to be his mother.

i hate being sick… i can’t sleep.

i was reading a thread on the baby discussion board i frequent re: holding your baby while he cries vs. letting him cry it out on his own. i have tried to let little bear cry it out before, and i hate it. i always go pick him up and cuddle him and sometimes nurse him until he calms down. sohei says that just teaches him he can have whatever he wants when he cries. which could be true. but i can’t stand just leaving him to cry. i worry that i’m spoiling him. a lot of people say you can’t spoil a baby, but what if i’m just setting him up for a huge disappointment when i eventually have to lay down the law? i mean, when he’s old enough to have tantrums for candy at the store, i sure as hell am not giving it to him. but if he’s used to my responding with care when he cries only to be chided for a tantrum, will he be confused? will he think i suddenly hate him?

i’m having this problem with co-sleeping as well. i love it, he loves it. it’s really the only way he’ll sleep. poor sohei has given up on moving him to the crib for now, because he doesn’t want to be kept up all night from the crying. that’s part of it for me, but i also just like having little bear sleep next to me. he’s easier to check on and feed, etc. but i probably won’t want him sleeping between us when he’s a little more self-sufficient, weaned, and out of the woods sids-wise. like, when he’s around a year old. but by then he’ll be used to it, and it will apparently be impossible to make him sleep on his own. people who are pro-co-sleeping say that he’ll sleep on his own when he’s ready, but what if that’s not until he’s four or something? the doctor said we should start having him sleep on his own now, while he’s more malleable. i reckon that really is what we should do, but i’m just not ready for him to go.

i sure wish my mum was still alive. nana says he’ll be fine no matter what i do, since i obviously love him. but am i spoiling him? is it stupid to let him keep sleeping in my bed? am i setting him up for disappointment later?

another problem i’m running into is that i don’t want to go back to work. i don’t think i’m going to do well with leaving him in daycare. i’m not saying that it’s bad to do things that way. a lot of women do, and their kids are just fine. it’s not that i’m worried he won’t be okay, it’s that i love spending time with him and i want to watch him grow and learn for a couple years. i’m not just enamored with him, i’m fascinated by him. also, like i mentioned above, i’m not really cool with him being left to cry it out, and i don’t see how a care provider who has other kids to deal with can give him the sort of attention i feel he should have. as it is, pretty much no one is as patient with him as i am. he has an ear-piercing shriek, which i know is hard to tolerate, but most of the time, it just breaks my heart. after a few cuddles, he’s usually okay. even some other mothers on the board have to go outside to keep from losing it with their babies. if mothers feel this way about their own kids, how is a stranger going to deal with my obnoxious little fellow?

i’m not saying i’m perfect or anything. far from it. i am seriously worried that i’m doin’ it rong. (it seems more than half the advice out there says that i am.) i just want him to grow up to be healthy and reasonably well-adjusted. i want him to know how much his mama loves him, and for him to feel secure. i know he’ll be fine in daycare when i do return to work. i just don’t wanna…

oh well. i have an appointment to take him to first thing in the morning, so i’d better try to sleep.

little bear and i went out again today. we went to the bookstore. he was a bit fussier this time, but i got him a couple of books before returning home. sohei caught a cold over the weekend, and now i have it, too. i felt kind of gross this morning, but i’m downright sick this afternoon. little bear seems okay, and i hope he stays that way. there are supposed to be antibodies in my breast milk, so he’s supposedly protected from the virus. and even if he’s not, he’ll be less sick. i hope that’s true.

i think i’m going to rest for a while, if he’ll let me…

ben and i had our first solo outing today. we went to the grocery store, and he was a very good baby. i carried him in the sling, which was a bit of a logistical nightmare.  but he was pretty quiet, and fell asleep toward the end. and, as you can see in the picture below, he looked pretty freakin’ adorable. i’m re-adjusting to driving without a rearview mirror, and it’s been okay. i sure do love that little fellow.

today, he rolled from back to tummy, then to his back again.

but he also pulled one of his teddy bears over his face and started flailing around like a maniac until i pulled it off of him.

what can i say? he’s advanced.

my little guy seems to be doing something new every day. this month, he started really laughing. before, he would try, but it came out all weird. this past saturday, 12/5, was his first genuine laugh. he squeals a lot now, too. he doesn’t cry as often (still screams, unfortunately), and chooses to babble or squeal instead. he’s also generally been sleeping more.

he’s been strengthening his abs, too, apparently. when we help him to sit now, we don’t have to pull much. we get him started and he goes the rest of the way on his own. he can sit, propped up with a pillow, for quite a while. his head almost never flops anymore. he can also stand for longer and longer periods, with help, of course. when placed on his stomach, he can change directions and inch forward a bit.

his vision seems to be getting better, as he can now follow objects pretty much all the time. his hearing still worries me a bit, as he only responds to sounds occasionally. when i call him by name, he doesn’t regularly turn to look at me. apparently, some babies don’t respond to their names until ten months, so i won’t worry. also, when he does look at our faces, he still smiles and can focus on us for a little while. he still babbles and coos, and can mimic us sometimes. when i say, “i love you” he replies, “aah-oo-uuu.” and when i say, “hello” he replies, “eeh-oo.” it’s pretty freaking cute. so he seems to be doing okay, though if he isn’t a bit better at responding to our voices by four months, i’ll have to ask the doctor about it.

aside from the occasional fussy period, he’s been great. he enjoys playing more now, and will spend more time on his tummy. he also likes grabbing his rattle (as well as fingers and anything else he can get his hands on) and sticking it in his mouth. it’s so funny to watch him taste things. he looks so interested in the world. he’s been pretty familiar with his hands, but he recently discovered his feet. they seem to perturb him for some reason. he frowns at them and grabs them now and then. i don’t know why he’s so consternated about his feet…

nursing has mostly become easy. he still flattens my right nip more than i’d like, causing painful vasospasm, but i feel more certain he’s getting enough milk now. i love how, when he’s done, he beams up at me with milk trickling out of the corner of his mouth. he never did that when i bottle fed him, so maybe there is something to the whole breastfeeding = bonding thing.

i love his smile. he smiles a lot these days. he seems like a very happy baby, which is a nice change from colicky.

and, now that he’s three months old, he’s supposed to be sleeping in his crib or bassinet. (i think i’ll be doing the in-room bassinet until he’s around six months.) that hasn’t happened yet. i like co-sleeping, especially as i’m nursing and all i have to do is roll him onto his side and commence to feedin’. sohei wants his bed back, though, so i’m going to have to bite the bullet and start getting little bear used to sleeping on his own. honestly, i probably won’t want him to still be co-sleeping at five, so everyone says it’s best to get him used to crib sleeping now. but waaahhh i don’t wanna!

i love watching my son sleep. i love him so much it makes me feel all splodey. and while i love sohei in splodey proportions also, this is totally different. sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s mine and that i could be so lucky. when i first brought him home, something about him seemed so impermanent that i was terrified of losing him somehow. i’d watch him all the time and have this constant feeling of anxiety like something might happen when i wasn’t looking. i still feel like that to some degree, which is why he still sleeps with me at night. i think “adoration” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

i may have mentioned this before, but that family guy “until you have a child” joke keeps ringing embarrassingly true to me. and now i have to go because little bear’s awake and smiling. i do love that kid.

once again, i’m late in documenting little bear’s milestones. it’s neat watching him grow and learn to do new things, but it feels like he’s growing up too fast…

when grandma babysat on 10/24, little bear rolled from tummy to back for the first time. over the course of the past month, he’s been working on his laugh, getting better at grabbing and holding things like his rattle, and can usually follow an object with his eyes. he especially seems to like watching brumby run around. sometimes, when he’s holding my fingers, he’ll put one in his mouth, which is pretty cute. though i know that before long, when he’s putting other things in his mouth, like pet toys and whatnot, it won’t be nearly as funny. he’s getting more vocal and still “talks” and smiles a lot, particularly in the morning. he’s also getting really good at keeping his head up. when we pull him into a sitting position, his head only lolls back about half the time. and when we have him sitting up, his head doesn’t tip back and forth anymore. he still needs support to sit, of course, but i can tell he’s getting stronger all the time.

his colic is a lot better now that i cut dairy out of my diet. he still cries and fusses, but not for hours at a time like he used to. he also figured out how to nurse this month. his latch isn’t perfect, but it’s getting a lot better, mostly. he had his first outing this month (that wasn’t to someone’s house or the doctor), when he went to the federal courthouse to watch his father get sworn in to the florida bar. he seems to be progressing at a decent rate, which is a relief as his head circumference percentile is a tad low. he’s still in the upper height percentile at 24 (!) inches, and average in weight at 12 lbs. gah! he’s 2 feet tall already!

my baby bear had his first series of vaccines today… i still think getting five at one go is a bit much, and i’m worried about him, but most reasonably scientific folks seem to think it’s okay. the doctor argued that little bear is exposed to all kinds of germs every day, which is true. however, none of them have ever given him a fever, so… anyway, i’m trying not to be one of those crazy vaccine people, but it’s hard. how can that not overload his little immune system, is all i’m saying. he’s not feverish enough to be concerned about, according to the doctor’s website and my trusty what to expect book, his temperature being in the 99.something range. i don’t know how sohei keeps from worrying like i do. i worry about sids and autism and vaccine reactions and just about everything else, but none of it seems to bother him much. and he just gets pissed off when i worry about it. i just feel like if something happened to my little guy, especially if it was my fault, i’d feel horrible.

in other news, he’s getting a bit better at nursing, and pretty much does that exclusively now, with only a supplementary bottle or two per day. my poor nips still hurt, as he’s still not always great at latching, but it’s not quite as excruciating as it was. also, the vinegar-water solution is keeping me mastitis-free so far. (i did get the antibiotics at a discount, so at least i can take them without having to pay for a doctor visit in the event that i get mastitis again.)

i’m going to go cuddle my baby boy, as he’s had a kind of rough day and is looking very cute right now. here’s hoping the next few days are uneventful…

it’s weird how i actually have things to write about now, but never do. that’s the thing about blogging i guess. when your life’s busy enough to be interesting, you’re too busy to blog. of course, it’s probably not that fascinating to anyone else, but whatevs.

yesterday, little bear went on his first outing that wasn’t to someone’s house or hotel. sohei was sworn in to the florida bar, and he was there to witness it. i would have taken pics, but no cameras or phones allowed. >_< sohei’s dad knows the judge, though, so he brought his camera. anyway, it was pretty cool. i got to see the chambers as well as the courtroom. and little bear was mainly good throughout the adventure. though he did lose his cool – along with mommy – when forced out of his comfy stroller and through the security checkpoint ad nauseum. (yeah, i strapped a bomb to my baby. because it would be worth blowing him up to stick it to the federal courthouse. *requisite eyeroll*) they searched his stroller. i wish i was kidding.

aaaanyway, i was also kind of pleased that i was able to wear my little black wedding dress to the event, which is something i haven’t been able to do in years. it’s a size 14 (though, admittedly, a bit stretchy), as opposed to the size 18/20 i was wearing pre-pregnancy. i’m not getting too attached to that size and the consistent weight loss, however, because the minute i stop expressing milk, i can expect the weight back with reinforcements. everything i read says that as long as i cut the “extra 500 calories” i take in a day to account for milk production, however, i should be fine. okay, so i guess when i cease lactating, as long as i only keep my intake between 250-500 calories a day total, i should be fine, then. bleh. at least i tend to like the way i look no matter what.

in other news, little bear finally figured out how to nurse. now that i’m only capable of producing about ten ounces per day, of course. i’m trying to pump as much as i can to get my supply back up, but i’m toying with the idea of fenugreek. if i can actually find a place that sells it that sohei will take me to. anyway, it’s not like i did anything special. i usually try at least once a day to get him to latch, and a few days ago he just up and did it. today i actually got him to nurse five times. i had to supplement, since i don’t make enough for him to be satisfied with, but at least he’s finally able to do it. i still don’t understand how he spent the past month and a half being incapable of breastfeeding, only for him to suddenly be able to latch well enough to actually eat. whatevs. i’ll take what i can get.

just one more thing, though. how is it that women who haven’t given birth and even some freaking men can coerce their bodies into being able to lactate, but i have to pump pretty much constantly and i still can’t get my supply back to the 25-30 ounces a day i was producing before? not fair!

little bear turned one month old on the 5th, and i intended to write a post each month detailing his milestones, etc. but haven’t had a chance. so i reckon i’ll go ahead and post it now…

he smiled what we think was his first genuine smile on 10/3. he’s been smiling since the day after he was born, and we think he’d smiled in response to us before last saturday, but we weren’t sure. on the 3rd, though, there was no denying he was smiling at us on purpose. and he’s been doing it a lot ever since. on that day, i was making faces and he broke into this adorable grin. then sohei got his attention and made a face and little bear beamed at him, too. he’s colicky and sleeps when he isn’t fussing, but we get some time to play every day, and he’s always very cheerful then.

little bear has also been making these cute vocalizations for the past two or three weeks. i love it when i talk to him and he seems to reply! and it seems like sometimes he tries to communicate that way instead of screaming or crying, which i totally appreciate. he even does this weird proto-laugh which at first i thought was asthma or something. maybe he’s just going to laugh like a nerd…

he’s been holding his head up since we were in the hospital, but he can do it for longer periods all the time. when we put him on his stomach, he picks his head up and looks like he’s trying to crawl. he kicks his little legs and eventually gets kind of frustrated, at which point i have to hold him and give him hugs. he can even hold his head up by himself for a bit when i pick him up and carry him.

sohei and i noticed, in the days after he was born, that he usually looked really contemplative. he pointed out that a lot of babies have kind of a dumb look about them, which is totally understandable, considering they’re, you know, babies. but we kind of thought he looked like an old soul, as my mum used to say. we also noticed that sometimes it looks like he wants to do so much more than he’s capable of, and he gets kind of frustrated at his limitations. not just with the crawling, but it seems like he wants to say something and of course he can’t. maybe we’re just crazy because we’re his parents and just assign all these weird theories to him, but it really feels that way. (and we’re kind of willing to admit that when everyone says he’s one of the cutest babies they’ve ever seen that it’s probably something everyone says. though of course we think he’s just about the handsomest baby ever. )

anyway, according to what to expect the first year, he seems to have met all his milestones for the first month. i’m going to try not to obsess over that kind of thing, but it’s nice to know he’s on track so far.

i detailed where my breastfeeding woes began – in the hospital – in the last post. but i’ve kept trying regardless. to start with, i went to see the lactation consultant at the hospital. (after trying and failing on my own for a few days at home.) she suggested a specific type of bottle, which my father-in-law bought and brought to me during a visit. she also recommended some strategies, like a lot of skin-to-skin contact, etc. so i started feeding him with the specified bottle, mostly with hand-pumped breastmilk. the hand pump was a pain to use, but i knew if i quit pumping, i’d lose my supply. i used it for almost four weeks. anyway, when we went to see the consultant, she felt his tongue tie (his tongue was tied down a bit with tissue and couldn’t extend past his gums) was impeding his ability to stay latched, so we went to get it clipped the next day. the ent guy who clipped him said it was a medium tongue tie and could indeed be keeping him from nursing. also, if we didn’t have it fixed, he could have speech problems later. so clip the excess tissue we did. it didn’t seem to hurt him much, thankfully, because i wasn’t sure i wanted to have it done.

that should have been that, but of course it wasn’t. he still was refusing to latch, so i called the consultant a few days after the procedure and asked how long it might take for him to be able to latch, etc. she said to give him a week or so. but then another problem cropped up, and we had to focus on that, so it ended up being more like two weeks after the clipping that i called her again. (i’ll detail the digestive issues in another post, maybe. like mother like son. in a nutshell, i had to restrict my diet again due to little bear’s apparent cow’s milk allergy.) she said to go ahead and come back in, which we did. during the session, he shrieked until we gave him his bottle – like at home – and managed to completely fill himself up on that. like at home. (he screams and cries until he’s full, and will refuse to even try to nurse when he’s like that.) so once he was full, after a lot of work, he finally latched. then sucked a couple times and let go. she said his latch was fine, but agreed that his impatience was an issue. unfortunately, there is no real answer for that. i’d just have to keep trying. thankfully, no-chan rented me a hospital-grade double pump a couple days beforehand, so at least it was just annoying to pump now and not painful. to my hands and wrists, anyway.

i was starting to lose hope, but at least we were doing everything right. all i had to do now was keep pumping, keep my supply up, and maybe he’d learn. then today my supply started to dwindle. i’ve barely been able to produce enough today to keep up with demand. i’d had literally more milk stored in the fridge than i’d known what to do with, and now i hardly have enough to give him at each feeding. so despite weeks of pumping and going to the consultant and buying expensive and hard to use bottles and restricting my diet and trying to patiently teach little bear to do what should come naturally to a baby, it’s pretty much over. now i’ll have to feed him formula primarily and supplement with breastmilk until it dries up entirely.

this entire ordeal has been really upsetting to me. i had kind of expected my labor and delivery experience to suck, as i’d been warned about that from the get-go. and i knew that breastfeeding could be difficult, but i thought if i tried hard enough, we could do it. i wanted him to be able to do it for health reasons, so the pumping was annoying but at least somewhat rewarding. but i also wanted to do it for bonding reasons, and it really hurts that i won’t have that. i missed out on all the post-delivery bonding stuff because of my surgery, and i can’t have this, either.

[i wrote this about a week ago, and guess i must have intended to say more, but i don't know what... anyway, my supply just keeps getting worse. i bet it'll dry up within the next month.]

okay, i have a lot of catching up to do…

so, first off, little bear’s birth story. i went to bed around 3 am on 9/5, because i couldn’t sleep. at 4ish, i had a dream that i was peeing myself and woke up immediately. i had either just peed the bed (a lot) or my water broke. i jumped out of bed to assess the damage, and as the liquid didn’t stop flowing down my legs, i figured it must be amniotic fluid rather than pee. sohei, who had been jolted out of slumber after the first frantic “uh oh” i uttered upon waking, wanted to know whether it was time. i said i figured it was and pretty much started panicking. he was supposed to wait until tuesday! what if the velamentous cord thing really was a problem and he was bleeding to death? this was about the last thing i wanted to happen. i’d hoped my water wouldn’t break until i was in the hospital and labor was well underway. no such luck. as it turned out, this would be only the first thing to go exactly the way i didn’t want it to.

after changing my underwear twice, and finally figuring out that the flow wasn’t going to stop, i grabbed a towel and we headed out to the car. i was kind of excited but mostly still panicky as we made our way to the hospital. i was dying to know what was going on in there and whether little bear was okay. also, why hadn’t any contractions started? sohei dropped me off at the women’s center and i went upstairs while he parked the car. i signed in, still dripping all over the floor and my shoes, and wondering if i was ever going to stop leaking. (short answer: not for quite a while.) i put a gown on and a hep lock was placed. i was assessed and – after two tries – found to still be at 2 cm dilated, 50% effaced. so no change since my last appointment. the prodding started some contractions going, anyway.

i was moved to the room where i was to labor and deliver, and they pretty much started me on pitocin right away. i wasn’t happy about that, as i wanted a chance to do things on my own, but i was still nervous and they made it sound like the pitocin would make things move a lot faster. fine. i wasn’t allowed to walk around, either, because they said his head wasn’t engaged and if i dilated too much, the cord could slip out or something. so i was stuck in bed on a monitor, with the pitocin flowing. exactly what i didn’t want to happen. still, i was relieved that little bear was okay, and that the most dangerous part for him re: cord was over. sohei and i hung out for a while, and he got some breakfast. i wasn’t allowed anything more than ice chips. i didn’t care that much, because i wasn’t all that hungry anyway. the contractions weren’t terrible, but they hardly stimulated my appetite. sohei’s mum showed up sometime between 8ish and 9, and stayed with us the entire time. i was really glad to have her there. before everything started, i thought i’d want to be alone or just have sohei there, at the most. but that wasn’t how i ended up feeling.

the nurse kept turning up the pitocin and the contractions kept getting worse. i finally ended up begging to be allowed to get up and at least shuffle around my bed, because when i got up to pee, that was the only time the contractions weren’t fucking awful. they said it should be fine at that point, so, with a monitor on my abdomen, a monitor in my uterus, and dragging around an i.v. pole, i stood up and paced a couple of steps back and forth and shifted my weight from foot to foot. it was about all i could do with all that shit strapped to me. it wasn’t long before i started feeling tired and frustrated, what with only having had one hour of sleep and not being able to actually move. so i went back to bed. more time went by, and i had a contraction that lasted at least three minutes non-stop. i told sohei to call the nurse, because the pitocin was killing me. i had been able to deal with the contractions up to that point, but having one that long with no break was too much. she turned it down or off – i don’t remember now, it being a month later – and i got to rest for a bit.

once the pitocin was started again, though, i couldn’t handle it anymore. by that point, i’d been laboring for ten hours, on one hour of sleep. and for the entire ten hours, i’d had the nurse and sohei pushing me to get an epidural every few minutes, and i was just sick of the whole thing. i finally relented and said i wanted the damn epidural. i knew that if i didn’t get to rest soon, i wouldn’t have energy to push when the time came. also, i was tired of people bothering me about just getting the epidural already. the procedure, which freaked me the fuck out to begin with, wasn’t pleasant. i was told i’d feel pressure or maybe a shock. what i felt was like someone thumped me right on the spine, and this weird dull ache followed. after what seemed like a bunch of futzing around, they had me lay back down again and kept asking me all these assessment questions. i guess it all checked out, because everyone finally left me alone. i couldn’t feel the contractions anymore at all. sohei and his mum decided to leave for a bit and let me sleep. i tried, but all this weird shit kept racing through my brain. it wasn’t at all restful and felt a lot more like a bad trip. then some alert started going off on one of my many machines, and no one came to check on me. worried that things were going south with little bear, i panicked and called sohei. he didn’t answer, and i was too foggy to think to do anything other than keep calling him. he showed up a few minutes later and asked the nurse about the beeping, and she said it was nothing and turned it off.

time had pretty much lost all meaning by this point, and i don’t know how much later it was when the epidural started to wear off. i could feel the contractions again, and they started to hurt pretty bad. an anesthesiologist (or some kind of tech, i don’t remember) showed up and fiddled with the catheter going into my back and pushed more medicine. it took the edge off, but i could still feel contractions. i was told that they were getting so intense, i was bound to feel some pressure. since “pressure” seems to be the medical terminology for “pain” i decided that this was just as good as it was going to get and gave up on getting any sort of pain relief from then on. not much later i noticed that i couldn’t feel – or move – my legs at all. i was pretty terrified as this hadn’t happened before. initially, i’d been able to feel it if someone pressed on my legs, and had been able to wiggle my toes a bit, etc. now i couldn’t feel or do anything, leg-wise. i still felt my contractions, though. after a while, they got excruciating. the pitocin was literally cranked up to 11, and the epidural was wearing off completely. i was afraid to ask for more meds, after the whole leg thing, but i couldn’t manage contractions that strong that went on for that length of time. they pushed more meds, which did fuck all this time, and said i couldn’t have any more for at least an hour.

they checked me and i was stuck at 9.5 cm. there was a little lip of cervix that was refusing to budge. but because i was starting to feel a lot of pressure, i could start pushing if i wanted, and the nurse would just hold that part out of the way. i tried pushing a few times and nothing was happening. i took a break, and was rolled over on my side to engage the baby’s head better. he was kind of stuck at an angle or something. then i felt more pressure and we tried again. nothing. the nurse went to get the doctor, and he came back and assessed the situation. then he informed me that everything had pretty much stalled and the baby wasn’t doing much in the way of moving downward. he said the baby was perfectly fine at that point and i could keep trying until he wasn’t, or i could go ahead and have the c-section now. i completely broke down. “i’ve been laboring for 17 hours, and now i have to have a fucking c-section?” (i had already lost any sense of decorum hours ago, when everyone including my mother-in-law saw everything there is to see below my waist.) the doctor wisely chose to leave to let me make my decision. i just sobbed. i didn’t want to keep going and end up hurting the baby. also, i just couldn’t do this anymore. especially when continuing meant they were going to increase the pitocin levels some more. i told sohei to tell the doctor i’d do it. but i made sure everyone was aware that i did not want to be knocked out. i was then told that they’d try not to, but it might be necessary. whatever. this wasn’t going to go the way i wanted it to no matter what anyway.

i’d had the shakes pretty bad off and on for a while, but after getting the surgical-strength dose of epidural meds, they became more like seizures. my teeth were chattering and my arms were jerking around like i was being electrocuted. i knew that the more i tried to stop shaking, the worse it would be, so i tried to relax. ha. they prepped me for surgery and wheeled me to the room, but i was really out of it. i didn’t think epidurals were supposed to affect anything above the waist, but they’d been making me sleepy and my mind all fitful, and this last one just about knocked me the fuck out. as far as i could tell, at least all the shaking was happening up top, so it probably wouldn’t interfere with the surgery. but i really felt like i was pretty much going to die anyway. once they had me all set up, they had sohei come in and sit next to me. the curtain was set up so high, neither of us could see anything from where we were. i felt a whole lot of pushing and shoving, and the nurse anesthetist told sohei to stand up and watch the baby be born. he said he’d rather not, and she pushed him to do it, so he stood up. i was watching him, as i couldn’t see the birth myself, and his face was priceless. “holy shit,” was about all he could manage, and not much later i heard little bear’s unique cry. he was brought to me a bit later, but i couldn’t hold him or anything. so i kissed his little face instead.

sohei left with little bear to do all the stuff they do with babies after they’re born, and he got to cut the cord and all. i wasn’t there for any of it, because i was being put back together. and the epidural was wearing off. it started as shooting chest pain. then i started to feel what was going on below the waist. it hurt. a lot. i started crying out in pain and the nurse asked if i was feeling anything. to which i replied that i was damn near feeling everything, and was promptly knocked out. when i came to, it was all done, and i was wheeled to the recovery room. i finally got to hold my little bear. they had me breastfeed him for a bit, did some other stuff i don’t remember, and we were then sent to my hospital room. at some point, i think sohei and little bear went to the nursery for his first bath, and someone came to try to get me up and walking. if i recall, it was about four hours post-op. i wasn’t ready. i tried, but my legs were still very shaky and wouldn’t hold me. i hadn’t had anything to eat in over a day, and wouldn’t be allowed to eat until sometime the next day. i explained that the epidural must still be lingering and i was shaky from not eating, but maybe we could try again later.

the rest of the hospital stay is kind of a blur. i know the next day we couldn’t wake little bear to eat, and the nurse on call said it was fine, and that he’d sleep a lot to start with. so, despite our attempts, he didn’t eat all day. and though i asked to see the promised lactation consultant, that never happened. the night nurse didn’t think it was okay that little bear hadn’t eaten all day and got me a pump and took him to the nursery for a cup feeding. i hadn’t wanted him to do anything but breastfeed, but she said he’d be too sluggish to try after not eating all day, and that cup feeding shouldn’t hurt anything. so off he went with sohei and the nurse, and i pumped. the next morning, sohei was gone to take care of the dog when all hell broke loose. i was yelled at for not feeding the baby the previous day, and was told that he was jaundiced and if he didn’t start eating, he’d have to be put under a lamp in the nursery. i asked whether i could keep trying to breastfeed, and whether i could at least go sit with him if he was taken away. no and no. and if the jaundice wasn’t cleared up on our checkout date, little bear would have to stay and we’d be leaving without him. by the time sohei got back, i was crying and trying to explain how i hadn’t wanted to starve him, but he just wouldn’t wake up, and the nurse from the day before had acted like it was normal. we had to force-feed little bear bottles all day, and this was the beginning of the end of my breastfeeding career. the rest of our hospital stay was fucking awful. i didn’t want visitors, but had them anyway. my attempts at nursing my son were futile, and i kept pumping while sohei kept giving him bottles. on the morning of our last day, i finally saw a lactation consultant, but by then it was pretty much too late. it was tuesday, and my son hadn’t breastfed since late saturday night, right after he was born. after a lot of struggling, we finally got him to latch, but he wouldn’t stay on long. he didn’t have the patience for it. (nor has he had the patience for alternative feeding methods or further nursing attempts since we got home. he seems to be permanently bottle-spoiled. and so goes any hope of my being able to breastfeed my baby, despite how important that was to me.)

so that’s the story of little bear’s birth, etc. i’m glad he got here safely, and that he’s mostly well. but now i know for sure i will not put myself through that again.

i had a pretty good appointment today. the ultrasound looked good, with little bear weighing in at about 9 lbs. (i guess he’s not such a little bear.) he was in perfect delivery position and looking healthy. and sleepy. he was resting his little face on his arm and looking comfortable. he’s not so tired right now, though, as he’s squirming around like crazy… anyway, the doctor said i’m 50% effaced and 2 cm dilated, which is quite a change from last week where nothing was happening at all. i knew that those contractions had to be doing something. then we scheduled the induction for next tuesday morning. assuming he doesn’t get here before then. sohei seems really nervous about waiting that long and i am, too, a bit, but i really want a certain doctor to deliver and that’s the only day she can do it. i was willing to go with a different doctor if it meant inducing sooner, as long as it was a woman, but it was just the men. none of whom i particularly care for. two of them rushed me through my appointments with them, and one of them was kind of loud and annoying. if little bear gets here before tuesday, i’ll have to live with having one of them do the delivery. which i don’t mind too much, because hopefully i’ll be fully in labor and have little need for intervention. (or being rushed through labor and delivery.) if i’m induced, though, i want someone patient that i trust, and none of them fit that description.

i’m afraid, of course, that i’m making a stupid decision. maybe i’m being too picky. and if something happens to little bear in the next week, it’ll be my fault. because if i’d just picked a closer induction date, maybe he’d have been okay. i know that if something goes wrong, sohei will never forgive me, and i’ll never forgive myself. i can always call the office and ask for a closer date, which i’m considering, just because my nerves keep getting the better of me. but i also liked the idea of waiting a week because i think i should give little bear a chance to come out when he’s ready. i don’t want to force him out in case i got the date wrong or something. but what if the velamentous cord thing becomes a problem? maybe i shouldn’t labor outside of a controlled setting… i kind of wish i didn’t get a choice in the matter, because i hate having this on my conscience. i guess i’ll have to see if waiting is worse than having a jerk for a doctor. i might lose my nerve completely and go in early.

i’m not in labor. humpf. he’s still low, and my stomach is still a bit ick, but that’s about it. if poor sohei’s up to it, i might try to naturally induce again this evening, as that’s been the only thing that seemed to get things going. and, you know, it’s fun. (if i do go into labor, btw, i’ll probably try to update via twitter.) here’s hoping little bear gets here soon…

there was a third loss announcement before the day was up. i can’t believe so many women lose their babies this late in the game, considering how supposedly medically advanced we are. i know at least two were lost in labor. if you’re in the damn hospital, how can that happen?! i don’t really want to think about it anymore. i can’t stand it.

anyway, it’s been an interesting day for me, physically. it felt like little bear dropped some more this morning, like i mentioned before. then i found myself having to go to the bathroom constantly. (and i don’t mean peeing, because constant peeing is pretty much an everyday thing at this point.) that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, though, because i frequently have days that i spend in the bathroom. though less so the further along i get in pregnancy. so between the weird dropping/pressure feelings and the frequent trips to the bathroom, i felt kind of off today. then sohei got home and we spent some quality time together. (which i’ve heard is good for getting labor going, but hasn’t done much to that effect yet.) afterwards, i started feeling very crampy. like menstrual cramps. i was kind of crampy over the weekend, and sometimes i wake up with them, but these hurt a little worse and were pretty much non-stop. i decided to try to push things along and had eggplant parmesan for dinner, which i’ve also heard is good for starting labor. (i have no idea where this one came from, as at least the sex thing has a somewhat scientific explanation.) not long after dinner, the cramping became less consistent, but was joined by lower back pain. now it’s about time for bed and i’m still having cramping and back pain, which has been joined by what’s starting to feel like an upset stomach.

so i’m feeling pretty uncomfortable, but the pain is far from excruciating. am i going into labor? i’ve been checking with my friend, the interwebz, and get mixed reviews. i guess i’m just going to go to bed and try to sleep, and if it gets worse or my water breaks, i’ll go to the hospital. otherwise, maybe i’ll call the doctor in the morning if i’m still crampy. we’ll see. it sure would be nice if i were going into labor, but i’m thinking as it’s been a few hours and the pain isn’t getting a lot worse, i’m probably not. instead, i’m just starting to feel kind of sick.

there were two announcements today on the september pregnancy board i read about losses. one of them had the same due date i do, and the other only had about five more days. part of me wishes i could call my doctor right this second and beg for a c-section. just waiting for my wednesday appointment is agony, and depending on what the ultrasound says, i’m going to be doing more waiting after that. (i’m hoping they find that he’s hit 9 pounds and i need to be induced that day, but i doubt it.) i know induction is wrong and that i’ll probably have a c-section in the end, but with every new horror story i hear, i just want him out of me and safe in my arms. he’s been kind of sluggish today, which can be a sign of impending labor, but to my panicky mind, it just gives me something else to worry about. i’m pretty sure he’s dropped a bit, too, as it hurts even worse than usual when i walk or try to pick my legs up to put on underwear.

gah, i am so ready for little bear to be here! then i can start worrying about whether he’s breathing and check on him constantly. (hey, at least i’ll be able to freaking see him.)

last night, sohei said he can’t believe the most exciting thing to happen to us ever is only a few days away. (after he said that, we thought about it for a couple minutes and couldn’t come up with anything more exciting than bringing a human being into the world, though i think we agreed that getting brumby was pretty exciting, too.) it’s almost over. it’s kind of weird. i mostly really enjoyed being pregnant, and i’m going to miss it. and i’m a little sad because i know i probably won’t do it again. but i can’t wait for him to be here. our family has been just the two of us for so long, and now we’re going to be adding someone to it. it’s also nice that sohei is so psyched about it. for the first time during this, though, i’m a little jealous of him. the entire pregnancy, i kept thinking how jealous i’d be if i were him. i can feel the baby and he’s with me all the time, and i get to experience all this stuff that sohei just can’t. but now i’d rather be in his position, in that he gets a great, new little bear, without all the pain of labor. i guess it’s only a day (or so) out of my life, but i’ll admit i’m getting just a bit nervous about it. oh well. in a week or so, he’ll be here. i can’t wait!

i went to my weekly doctor appointment today, where i learned that i am not at all effaced or dilated. i know that these exams don’t really mean a whole lot, in that some women are completely closed and end up in labor the next day, and some get stuck at 3 cm for two weeks. but aside from some painful practice contractions, i’m really showing no signs of going into labor any time soon. so it’s looking like i’m going to be induced in about a week and a half. when this whole thing started, i was adamant about not being induced or having a c-section, etc. but i’m just kind of over it now. i have these irrational fears about him having a knotted cord or it being around his neck or something, so i really just want him out. i know it’s stupid, but if we made it this far to lose him now, i’d pretty much die. so, yeah, i’m so beyond caring how he gets here or whether i have to have an epidural or whether i get cut open or what. if they’d given me the option of going straight to the hospital today and getting a c-section, i’d probably have said yes.

it’s funny how much different things are than they were a few months ago. how much my attitude has changed regarding things. and then there are things that i used to dread that i’m now actively hoping for. when i spotted a few months ago, it felt like the end of the world. now i want to see some freaking blood, damn it! and cramps would throw me into a panic, but no longer. cramping and contractions? more please. (not that they’re actually doing anything, apparently. ) and why was he so ready to leave seven or eight months ago, and now he won’t budge? what the hell, little bear?

I met with little bear’s future pediatrician today. There are three doctors in the practice, and the two I met looked younger than me. Which isn’t saying much nowadays, I guess, but you know… Anyway, she’s really nice and isn’t making me vaccinate him in the hospital, and said we can do his vaccines (or not) however I want. Also, I can call at any time, and have my questions answered whenever I’m freaking out. The practice seems well-run, and she’s not a jerk about stuff, so as long as we can afford them, that’s where we’re going.

While I was waiting to see her, I had my first serious ouch contraction. My Braxton-hicks have been painless though slightly uncomfortable until now. This one freaking hurt. And it went all the way around to my back. I feel kind of sick to my stomach even now, and my back still feels a bit tight. But there are no other indicators of impending labor, so I think it’s just practice. Maybe he’ll be here soon, though…

brumby hasn’t barfed again, so hopefully he’s feeling better. the other day, he had his head on my stomach, like he tends to do lately, and little bear kicked him. and brumby just looked up at me, bewildered, as if to say, “what happened, mama?” poor puppy. i wonder what he thinks is going on inside my belly. he seems to listen sometimes, and the kick definitely startled him. maybe he thinks i’m going to have puppies.

i can’t wait for little bear to get here. it’s starting to drive me nuts. i know he’s not even due yet, but i want him now! i want the whole labor and delivery thing to be over with, and for him to be here at home with us. also, sohei begins each day by asking if he’s going to be born already. we’re definitely getting antsy…

while i’m on the subject of weight-related issues… i’ve been really surprised at how good pregnancy has been for my self-image. i was doing pretty well regarding fat acceptance, thanks to the likes of shapely prose and all those books i read. but i was a little scared that pregnancy would make me gargantuan, and that i wouldn’t be able to handle it. but i have felt nothing but gorgeous this whole time. i don’t think i’ve looked in the mirror once and had a negative thought. (well, okay, the stretch marks do look awful, but i’ve been pretty good about ignoring them. they’ll fade.) in general, i’ve loved how pregnancy makes me look. and while i always thought i wouldn’t be one of those women who rub their bellies all the time, i totally do. part of it is because it’s the closest i can come to touching little bear, but it’s also just fun to feel how big and round it is. it’s even dwarfing my boobs and butt, which i thought was impossible. anyway, pregnancy has just given me a very nice silhouette. i’m not sure how i’ll feel about it when i still look six months’ pregnant after giving birth, but for now, i like it. (since my total weight gain is still under 20 pounds, i’m honestly not sure i’ll look too terribly different from pre-pregnancy when all is said and done. not a few months down the road, anyway.)

i’ve also noticed that i feel no shame about my body in certain situations, either. i’ve been swimming a lot this summer, mostly in front of strangers, and it hasn’t bothered me at all. i’ve proudly stuck my belly out and waddled past a crowd of people i’ve never met, at no-chan’s house. it wasn’t long ago that i don’t think i’d have dared. and i walk to the pool in our complex in just suit, sandals, and towel. i don’t even own a cover-up. i don’t know if it’s because i’m pregnant or if i’m finally accepting my body, but i just don’t care. if i want to swim, i’ll swim. i also thought if i ever got a massage, i’d be too mortified to really enjoy it. not so! i felt surprisingly little embarrassment at having a strange man rub my naked back with oil. i didn’t care if my back looked fat or if he could see my stretch marks. (i was on my side, with a towel over my boobs, so you could pretty much see everything from the waist up except nip.) actually, i was so relaxed i dozed off.

i was reading an excellent post over at shapely prose the other day, regarding how most of us can accept how fat we are now, but are unsure how we’d deal with being any fatter. and a lot of women said they were terrified of getting pregnant because of that. but speaking from personal experience, unless your significant other or family members are a bunch of douchebags who make you feel bad about it, being pregnant is kind of a positive step in the fat acceptance journey. i realize that i’m lucky that my husband happens to love my pregnant body, maybe even more than my regular one. but even if he didn’t, i still think this would have been a good experience for me, self-image-wise. and it makes me sad that so many women would pass this up because they’re freaked out about how they’ll look. i always feel bad for the not fat women on the message board i read, when they say their s.o. isn’t attracted to them anymore, or they feel disgusting or whatever. it sucks that we live in a society where so much of who we are is tied up in how much we weigh.

wow, i never update anymore…

so i had my second baby shower on the 1st. no-chan and sohei’s mum threw it for me at no-chan’s house. it was neat to see a lot of people i never see anymore. also, between the shower and genma and gift cards, little bear’s nursery is now pretty much complete, and he should have everything he needs. i finished up the shopping today and got him an extra crib sheet, a 2-pack of bumgenius cloth diapers (yeah, i’m giving it a go, but at $35/pack, i’m trying it out before buying more.), and a sling. (because i guess i’m also giving the “attachment parenting” thing a go. i think i’ll like having him strapped to me at all times, but we’ll see.) i also got him the classic pooh musical mobile. the mobile is actually the only thing i’ve bought for him with my own money, if you can believe it. frankly, i can’t. the kid has more clothes than he’ll probably ever wear, diaper gear, a travel system, a playard, toys, and myriad other stuff. every time i go into his nursery, i feel kind of overwhelmed. not just because there will be another human being living in our house in a couple weeks, though that does kind of blow my mind. but also because everyone has been so good and generous to us. my son is going to be the first (biological) grandchild for all our parents, and is also the last male with our name, which is important to genma. everyone’s so anxious for him to get here, me included. i really did enjoy my pregnancy, but the last real hurdle is this possible cord issue, and the danger it poses has to do with delivering him, so i’d really like him to just be here already. every morning, sohei wakes up and asks if i’m in labor yet, and asks little bear when he’s going to get here.

and i’m still so, so happy to be back home. i get visits from no-chan and sohei’s mum all the time, which is nice. i missed my family so much. and if it weren’t for their help with shopping and unpacking and stuff, i don’t know what i’d do. even if i had my car, i’m not sure i can drive now. my belly is huge, and the no a/c thing would really be a problem at this point. it’s awesome to have everyone so nearby, and it was so nice of no-chan to let me stay with her all the times sohei was away this summer. and we’ve been seeing some old friends, too. after the relative social desolation of tallahassee, this kicks ass.

went to the doctor yesterday, and she said my pregnancy is going really well. no major issues (she doesn’t seem to see the diabetes as much of an issue as my numbers are mostly good), not too much weight gain, measuring well, etc. i’m actually pretty good at being pregnant. who knew?

i always mean to talk about all kinds of things when i sit down to write a post, but forget what half of it was. oh well…

i’ve been watching little bear in the afternoons. i can’t wait to watch it with my little bear. it’s still another couple of months until he’s due to be here… while it’s neat feeling him and seeing him move around, i think it’ll be nicer to actually be able to hold him. hugging my stomach just seems weird, anyway. also, my body’s so messed up, it’ll probably be better for him outside of it. i worry about what my high blood sugar might be doing to him. (my morning fasting sugars are always too high, and my post-meal numbers are too high about half the time. i’m working on it, but honestly don’t know what to do about the fasting number. it’s looking like insulin for me.)

lately, i’ve been thinking about all the books i want to get for him. i think i’m going to start reading to him pretty much right away. i’m going to buy all the little bear books, of course. and i already have winnie the pooh collection. i want him to have at least one richard scarry book, and where the wild things are. (yeah, i guess that is a lot of maurice sendak.) and lots of dr. seuss, obviously. and then there are all the books i loved when i was a kid, that i used to get at the library, like space case. oh, and that one where they went to a farm on a field trip and the giant snake got loose and wreaked havoc.

and though we don’t really know when we’ll actually be back in our house (we’re hoping mid-july at this point), little bear has just about everything he needs. no-chan was kind enough to buy his crib, as well as a ton of adorable clothes (most with bears on them), a bathtub, and a little chair thingy i can put him in when i can’t carry him around. i want the matching playard really bad, but i’m waiting to see if i get it as a gift. i think sohei’s mum might be getting it. she already got the bedding i wanted. everyone’s been really generous, and sohei and i will have to buy hardly anything at all. we need a car seat and a stroller, but we’re not sure what to get. should we get a travel system? a separate convertible seat and stroller? part of the problem for buying anything for him so far is that we have no idea how big he’s going to get. he’s measured pretty big so far, and the diabetes is going to make him fat as well. he could very easily weigh over 9-10 pounds. and i don’t want a bunch of stuff he’ll outgrow in a couple months. i’m also going to get him a bookshelf to hold all those great books i’m getting him. (with a door and drawer insert thrown in for good measure, maybe.) i think, if there’s time, i’d like to paint his room. we’re still going with sage green. i just want to get in there and freaking nest already!

i just saw little bear hiccuping. poor little guy. i know it doesn’t cause him any discomfort (according to what i’ve read, anyway), but it sure felt weird to me. i can’t seem to get used to watching my stomach jump around…

sohei felt little bear move this morning. he had his arm around me, over my waist/stomach, and said he thought he could feel him kind of fluttering around. i woke up and little bear was indeed doing his morning stretching, or whatever it is he does that isn’t kicking or punching. i’m glad he can finally feel him, because every time he starts kicking, either sohei isn’t around, or he stops moving when sohei puts his hand on my belly. yesterday, little bear had some kind of fit or something, because i felt all this movement, and looked down, and my stomach was jumping all over the place. it was almost cartoonish. then last night, i tried to do a kick count before bed, and it took 25 minutes because he wouldn’t cooperate. but when i was trying to sleep, all of a sudden he couldn’t sit still. i hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

the doctor visit went okay yesterday. little bear was more cooperative, so we got some pictures of his face, and the tech could see the cord a little better. they don’t really see a problem with the cord, but will keep an eye on it. my relief didn’t last long, because it turns out i may have preeclampsia. there was protein in my urine, so now i have to do a 24 hour collection and yet more blood tests. my blood pressure seems fine right now, so i’m trying not to worry about it. still, could there be one trimester in this pregnancy where i don’t have to worry about something? (to review, 1st trimester i was diagnosed with threatened miscarriage, 2nd trimester was diagnosed with marginal/velamentous cord insertion, and now in my 3rd trimester i may have preeclampsia and am also being tested again for diabetes. w00t.)

little bear seems fine, though. i guess he’s measuring pretty large at 3 pounds, and has a giant head. (not like hydrocephalic huge, but big.) according to the tech, his heart is “beautiful.” he seems to have a round moon face like his mum, but i think he’s got his dad’s nose. (i don’t have a scanner handy, but will upload some of the 4d pics at some point.) i’m really looking forward to seeing how he turns out.

there’s no real news on the cord issue front. little bear was being completely uncooperative at the ultrasound on tuesday, and wouldn’t move his leg so the tech could track his cord to the insertion point. however, because he’s a whopping 2 lbs 4 oz, i suspect that there might not be a cord issue at all, particularly as the tech said it sure looked like it was inserted just fine. she just couldn’t confirm, because she couldn’t see it clearly. (she shook my belly and made me lay on my side, and he still wouldn’t move.) then she did a 4d shot, but he had his hands in front of his face, so we didn’t get a clear look at that, either. but i’ll be having another u/s in two weeks, and probably more after that, so there should be plenty of opportunities to have a look at his sweet little face.

i’m staying at no-chan’s house while sohei and his dad are at a convention in chicago. i haven’t stayed here since christmas, when we found out i was pregnant. when i go into the bathroom where i took the positive test, it seems hard to believe that it was five months ago that i stood there and watched the second line show up. and it makes me miss sohei even more, for some reason. i hate being apart from him now even more than i used to. it gives me insomnia.

well, i’m finally back home. we got here on tuesday. i don’t feel much like writing, so here’s the last few days in a nutshell:

may 13th was my last day at work. i went in, tied up some loose ends, went to my baby shower/going away thing, then went home. most of who i thought were my work friends didn’t show to the party, and thankfully sohei was there, because there was something kind of awkward feeling about the whole thing. little bear got a lot of cute stuff, though, so whatevs.

when we got home, we finished packing for our trip and took off for destin. it was a last minute kind of thing, and i packed really light. (as in one dress, one swimsuit, enough undies for four days, shorts, a sports bra, and some toiletries.) the drive was kind of a pain, but the hotel we ended up at was really cute, and it was right on the beach. the view from our room was amazing, and we had a private balcony to enjoy it from. we went right down to the beach to swim, and discovered that where we were swimming was pretty much jellyfish soup. little jellyfish bits were floating around everywhere, and sohei managed to get stung. (there were no whole jellyfish to be seen; just tentacle pieces. i guess something had just had a jellyfish feast and these were the leavins.) the next day we spent practically the whole day down at the beach. i had a shaded chair, but managed to get badly burnt on my legs and chest somehow, regardless. spf 70 sunblock my ass. sohei got really burnt, too, only everywhere because he didn’t have a shade chair. so now the skin on my upper boobs is crepey and blistered, and the sides of my legs are purple. it was really fun until we went inside and discovered how burnt we were. i hardly slept the next two nights because it hurt so bad. since we couldn’t really hang out on the beach on friday, we went and looked at some dunes and stuff, and went to the gulfarium. we saw every animal show and it was fun. aside from the horrible sunburn, the trip was actually pretty nice. since we had a kitchenette, we ate some of our meals on the balcony, and i spent a lot of time just reading and looking at the view. still, thanks to the sunburn and being pregnant, holy edema, batman.

then we went home on saturday and packed and cleaned until monday night. we left for tampa on tuesday morning in separate cars and got here safely despite being rained on the whole time. (i am so glad i never have to make that trip again. especially in my beater of a car.) it’s been super rainy in florida this week, for some reason, but it’s nice because it’s a lot less hotter than usual and maybe it’ll put a dent in the drought.

yesterday we went over to pinellas for my first doctor appointment here. it was so good to see her again, and she totally recognized me! but we found out there was some confusion about the ultrasound results. the doctor who did the scan said i had a marginal cord insertion, but on the report, it said velamentous insertion. the former isn’t a big deal, but the latter is. if it’s velamentous, i could lose the baby. so i’m getting another ultrasound on tuesday to see which of the two it is. if it’s marginal, i’ll have to go in for scans every few weeks to make sure the baby’s growing okay, but that’s it. if it’s velamentous, i’ll have to have an early c-section and hope the cord doesn’t come loose in the meantime so little bear makes it to delivery day. if it does come loose, there’s really nothing we can do. i think that’s what i hate most about this. i could lose him, and there’s no way to fix this so that doesn’t happen. i just have to hope it doesn’t. even if i were on bedrest for the rest of my pregnancy, he could still twist the cord or pull it somehow, and that would be that. i guess i shouldn’t worry until we find out what’s wrong, but it’s so fucking frustrating. there’s around a 1% chance of having this sort of cord problem, so of course it would happen to me.

then we found out today that our tenant is freaking out about having to find a new place to live, so he may not leave when he’s supposed to. which means we’ll have to go through eviction proceedings. which will further fuck up bar stuff for sohei, and i won’t be able to get the house ready before little bear gets here. in fact, we may be bringing the baby home to the room we’re sharing at my father-in-law’s house. great. of course we’d have to rent out our goddamn house to some idiot nutjob. i don’t even like to think about what he’s done to it since he’s been there. i wish he’d just fuck off so i could fix it up and have it ready for the baby. as it is, i’m not going to be able to do much with it, since sohei’s already talking about letting the bank foreclose on it. i love that house so much. i wanted to paint and put in some new floors and stuff, but there’s no point. even if psycho tenant leaves like he’s supposed to, we’re not keeping it anyway. instead we get to be renters for the foreseeable future. i just wanted my own house. i didn’t care if it was small or attached to another house or whatever. i hoped when we came back that we’d stay in the st. pete house for a long time, but it seems like it’s going to be temporary. i’m sick of moving. i want to settle down for a few years in a house that’s mine and that i love.

i guess this ended up being a lot longer than i’d meant it to, but there’s been so much other shit going on, i haven’t been able to vent about this stuff. i don’t really have anyone to talk to about it, and sohei has enough on his mind. besides which, he hates that house for some reason, so there’s really no point in talking to him about it. i thought things would be better when i came back home, but everything’s just a damn mess now. it is good to be back, because i missed it, but nothing’s going right at all. nothing ever does, though, so it’s not like i should be surprised.

little bear’s being pretty active this afternoon… i love him so much. i can’t wait til he gets here… i was talking to someone this morning, and little bear gave me a pretty solid kick, which made me jump. the lady i was talking to thinks maybe he’ll be a soccer player or something. he sure can pack a punch.

aside from freaking out every now and then about stuff like whether he’s moving enough or too frantically or whatever, pregnancy’s still going well. everyone keeps noting how swollen my legs/ankles/feet are, though. my blood pressure has been good so far, so i’m trying not to dwell on it. the only thing that’s really bothering me is that my pubic bone area hurts. i’m hoping it doesn’t become that severe issue where you can hardly walk or whatever. i think empress had it pretty bad last time? so far, it’s just some pain in my crotchtal area, so it might not even be the same thing. also, i got an awful charley horse on the morning of sohei’s graduation. i used to get them a lot anyway, but this was my first pregnancy one. and my muscle had a knot in it for two days! sohei rubbed it, and it finally felt better the next day. but i couldn’t straighten my leg much or walk on it well for a couple days. it’s not usually quite that bad.

i guess i forgot to mention sohei’s graduation. it was on saturday, and his dad and mum and no-chan came up on friday. we all went to dinner and everything was pretty good. sohei’s parents don’t see each other much, and sohei worries when they’re going to be together, but i don’t know why, because they’re totally amicable! i don’t know what they were like when sohei was little, but i’ve seen them together a few times since we started dating, and they’ve never been anything but friendly. it was funny listening to the three old folks talk about all these people they all know and old times and stuff. (no-chan was married to a family friend who everyone knew, and they were all in the same social circle and everything, so they all knew who everyone was talking about.)

anyway, i’m so proud of my bear. he worked really hard the past three years, and graduated with highest honor, summa cum laude. (less than ten people in his class of 200 graduated with that distinction.) he also had one of the longest book lists (booking a class means you got the highest grade) and a bunch of other mentions for extracurriculars. and made the dean’s list every semester, though he did that in undergrad, too. he’s going to be so good at what he does. we talked to his bankruptcy professor at the reception, and he clearly thinks sohei is brilliant. his dad and i think so, too, but we’re obviously biased. seriously, though, he always comes up with these great theories when his dad runs into problems with cases. he has such a good mind for this stuff. his dad recently won a rather sizable settlement for a client, and parts of his winning argument came from sohei’s ideas.

i guess i’d better get back to work. i have some stuff to finish up before i leave…

i guess i haven’t said anything in a while. work has been crazy, as we’re moving our whole department and the service/circ desks upstairs. i’m finally at my desk, with computer hooked up, in a nice little corner they found for me. there’s windows nearby and everything, which i appreciate in a work space. i also like having my back to the wall and only one neighbor, so no one’s paying any attention to the fact that i spend most of my time looking at baby-related websites. hey, i’ve got a week left. who the hell doesn’t just phone it in at that point? (actually, most people i know don’t bother coming to work at all in their last week, but i only have a couple of hours of time off saved up, so i’m just going to leave early a few times or something.)

and i went to the doctor yesterday. it went fine. and you know all that weight i didn’t gain in the first trimester? i’m making up for it now. which i don’t understand, because i actually ate way more last trimester than i am in this one. it’s weird, actually, because a lot of the time, i barely finish dinner anymore. now i’m eating like i did before i got pregnant, except a more substantial lunch when i get home. i dunno… i’m not particularly distressed about it, because i think i look pretty freaking adorable. and since i’m supposed to be more concerned about little bear being underweight at this point, i’m not too worried about turning him into some sort of giant baby. i did kind of freak the other day, though, when i realized all i’d had to eat by dinner time was a piece of cake and a cookie from a party i went to earlier in the day. they say overeating doesn’t help make a growth-restricted baby get any bigger, but i’m sure it doesn’t hurt. and not eating probably does hurt, so i’d better get on that. (i still think eating massive amounts in the first trimester helped put him at his target size at the last ultrasound. )

so, yeah, everything’s going pretty well. despite sohei’s panicking, we seem to be on track with the upcoming move. i can’t believe i’m going to be back home in less than two weeks… i can’t wait to be back with my family. i think i’ll feel a little less worried about everything with them around for support, and it’ll be nice to be seen by my old doctor again, too. it just seems like something you should have family around for, you know? i’ll get to see sohei’s parents and no-chan this weekend, for his graduation. i’m looking forward to showing off my bump!

i was just reading a thread on the pregnancy board i frequent about how this woman and her husband were so devastated at finding out they weren’t having a girl that they didn’t even finish the ultrasound. they’re both super depressed. and a lot of other women chimed in that they felt the same way. while i understand wanting a girl really badly, i can’t imagine reacting this way to your own baby. i guess i’m so pessimistic that i was glad just to see that he was alive and seemingly well. (you don’t even want to know the kinds of problems i was imagining we’d be greeted with that day.) now i’m incredibly impatient to get to the end so i don’t have to keep worrying about what might be going on in there. and it’s hard to fathom not loving him because he’s a boy. i’m just so glad he’s here… i feel awful for some of these children, and hope their parents get a grip before the baby is born.

i don’t have much time to write, so i may expand upon this later. but i wanted to put it out there so i don’t forget.

i think part of the reason i’ve always been so gung-ho for having a girl is because i felt like i’d be able to handle some of her crises better, because i’ve been there. i still remember quite well what elementary school can be like if you’re shy and/or fat. i can remember being a teenage girl and all that entailed. and i have some thoughts on what to tell a girl about her body issues. but i have no idea what it’s like to be a boy! i don’t know how a boy should handle things like bullying or feeling ugly or disputes with friends. i don’t know what it’s like to have a voice that cracks at inopportune times or body parts that do other embarrassing things at inopportune times. (i know what it’s like to accidentally fart in front of someone you have a crush on, but i have a feeling that it might be slightly less mortifying than standing at the chalk board with a boner.) i know that sohei will be able to handle a lot of this, but the thing is, i don’t want him to. not alone, anyway. i had all these notions about the ideas i wanted to plant inside my poor child’s malleable brain. i know what i want for my kid. but i can’t help but worry that maybe sohei will have a solution that i might not agree with if i knew more about the situation. thankfully, i’m not sure this will come up too often, since most of the time we seem to be sharing a brain. but i’d be lying if i said i wasn’t a little worried about how to handle these things, or whether sohei will handle them like i would…

when you’re pregnant, it seems like one of the first questions that comes to mind for people is what the baby’s sex is. and if you don’t know, they’ll ask what you want. after the 1st trimester issues, i’d say that sohei and i always kind of assumed we’d have a girl, but i’d be happy as long as the baby just makes it here okay. i thought that maybe, after years of referring to our future unborn as “zoe” i might be disappointed a little if the baby was a boy. it turns out, however, that i was so happy just to see my baby bear on that screen, moving around and looking just fine, that it didn’t matter what he was. when i tell people we’re having a boy now, a lot of them seem to expect me to be disappointed. i’ve been reading an online board for other women due in september, and some of them were so disappointed at their ultrasound that they started crying and have been depressed and stuff. but i’m not at all upset. i can’t imagine, after “meeting” him, being anything but thrilled and completely in love. sohei and i daydream and talk about our futures together, and i find myself thinking about his sweet little face far too often.

so, no, i’m not all that disappointed in the fact that there will probably never be a zoe. i’m a little sad, i guess, because she was kind of a presence in our lives for so long. but ben is here, and real. and i can’t wait to get to know him. and smother him with affection.

gah I’m obsessed with little bear… Earlier this week he was moving a lot, but he’s been kind of quiet the past couple of days. I find that I miss feeling him move when he’s quiet. Even though he’s finally moved off my bladder and only occasionally kicks it. I won’t lie, though, some of it’s worry when I don’t feel him move. I guess I still have a hard time believing I could be this lucky.

It’s a pain in the ass updating from my iPod, so I’ll just end here. I love you little bear!

i’m officially at the half-way point today! man, after the 1st trimester, the weeks just flew by! this pregnancy is going to be over before i know it. i reckon it’s just as well, since i’m guessing that this constant bladder irritation isn’t going to end and i’ll never get used to it… and anyway, i’ll be so happy if we make it to term, and to see my boy’s healthy and all. i wonder if the time will fly when we’re staying with sohei’s dad. sometimes when i’m not working, the time flies a lot less. i know i’ll be glad not to be on my feet or stuck in an uncomfortable chair so much. the bigger i get, the more going to work sucks. i don’t know how other women do it. anyway, i’d better get back to work. and stop looking at my ultrasound pictures. (yes, i think i have a problem.)

i love my little boy! it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life to see him on that screen yesterday. his little arms were waving around, and at the point above, he looked right at us. he’s been kicking up a storm this evening, and now i can imagine what he looks like flailing around in there. after the misfortune of my coworker, i’m afraid to say i can’t wait to meet him. (believe me, little bear, i can wait around 20 more weeks! so stay put!) still, i am so looking forward to holding him.

anyway, the scan went pretty well yesterday. there’s nothing at all wrong with our little bear. there is something slightly wrong with my placenta, however. it’s called a marginal insertion, which is when the umbilical cord attaches to the placenta at the end rather than in the middle. out of all the things i worried about, i never really gave any thought to that. probably because i’ve never heard of it before, and none of the pregnancy books i’ve read (not a one!) even mentioned this condition. the doctor didn’t seem to think it’s a big deal, but said i have to get ultrasounds every few weeks to make sure he’s growing okay. it is a little nerve wracking, because there’s not a lot of information on it. the only risk the doctor mentioned is that it can cause the baby not to grow as much as he should, but little bear is exactly the right size for now. i read a couple of things that indicated an increased risk for stillbirth, but i think those people were confusing marginal insertion with something like vasa previa. which i apparently don’t have, because my placenta is up near my fundus, in exactly the right place, and nowhere near my cervix. so i refuse to worry about this. i know my little guy is going to be okay. and i love him even more now that i’ve seen him. and his sweet little skull face.

so proto-joey will henceforth be known as little bear.

man, i’m starting to feel paranoid… i keep seeing all this horrible news about people dying, and i just found out that my coworker’s preemie isn’t doing too well. (i really, really hope that sweet little baby pulls through.) also, all these ominous dark clouds are gathering outside. i’m not expecting any particularly bad news today, since the tetra test was fine, but all this gloom is just nerve-wracking.

also, not for the first time, i really hate my goddamn bladder. the constantly full feeling is driving me crazy. i wish i could take those pills that you take when you have utis, where you can’t feel your bladder at all, and your pee turns orange. i’m pretty sure those are not allowed while pregnant, however. if proto-joey came out looking like an oompa loompa, i’d feel awful. worse than i feel now, even.

so, today’s the big day! the day i’ve been waiting for since learning i’m pregnant… if all goes well, i’ll be finding out the sex of proto-joey today. also, the place i’m having the procedure done will tape it for you. i was kind of like, gah, vhs? but it turns out the digital media center here at the library will convert vhs to cd or dvd, so w00t! and i actually found an unused vhs tape last night, so i’m good to go. ughhhh 2:00 will never get here…

dear proto-joey,

please stop laying on/kicking my bladder. getting up to pee every five minutes is getting pretty frustrating.

love,

mum

i had another uneventful checkup yesterday. the baby’s heart is still plugging away, and everything seems fine for now. i can’t wait til the ultrasound on friday. neither can sohei, apparently. it kept him up last night. he has his usual apprehension about it (he always gets nervous before ultrasounds), but mostly he’s excited. i think we’re both kind of assuming it’s a boy, since everyone we know is having girls, and we’re getting kind of psyched about the idea. of course, we’ll be happy no matter what we have, but after referring to our potential child as “zoe” all these years, it’s good to get ready for something different. he was thinking about what it’s going to be like to have a kid and all the things we’ll get to do. as easter approaches, i’ve been getting kind of excited about celebrating holidays with our kid. (even though we’re not at all religious, shut up.) it’ll be so fun to watch her (still sticking with the feminist neutral until we know better thankyouverymuch) hunt for easter eggs and open christmas presents. i think it’s really cute that it kept sohei up, though. it’s like christmas…

(and we’re not the only ones who are excited, apparently. proto-joey’s been going nuts in there the past few days. oof.)

i definitely felt proto-joey kicking up a storm last night. i was lying in bed doing a crossword puzzle, and she would not settle down. i wish i felt her more during the day, but i hear they’re more active at night. my baby is definitely a spaz.

i’m going back to the doctor today for my regular monthly checkup. looking forward to hearing that little heartbeat again!

i think proto-joey just kicked the hell out of me again. it’s amazing what such a tiny thing is capable of… i’m starting to get a little nervous about the beating i’m going to get a couple months from now, when she really packs a wallop.

ugh tired. i’ve been getting up a lot more often to pee again, after a few weeks’ respite. i am left to think the baby is using my bladder as a trampoline, as my uti culture is apparently negative. doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable, though it does make it slightly less worrisome. (as we all know, my utis don’t respond to anything less hardcore than cipro, which is a no-no while pregnant.)

after mooning around the past couple of weeks, i finally gave in and bought the dinosaur jr. album, where you been, in mp3 format on amazon. because it was one of our frequently-played albums when we used to drive around. (we listened to cassettes back then, so i’ve been getting them in used cd format in the meantime. but i can never find that album used.) so now it’s been added to my “<3″ play list along with the soundtracks for pulp fiction and sliver, urge overkill’s saturation, and bryan adams’ single ever loved a woman. (that last song is one of “our songs” because it’s the first slow song we danced to at prom. or ever, really. since then, we’ve graduated to louis armstrong’s a kiss to build a dream on. but that was our song back then, and kind of always will be, i guess.) so, yeah, i’m listening to that play list pretty consistently these days, and it’s nice to have some new songs on it.

anyway, i guess i’d better get back to work. even though i still can’t think about anything but the baby and going back home. oh, and i forgot that i actually wrote down my test results from before. i was mostly right.

osbr (open defects?) – 1:1,713
dsr (downs, i presume?) – 1:10,000
t18 (trisomy 18) – 1:2,723

i went to the doctor yesterday because something has been feeling not quite right “down there” for the last few days. turns out that everything looks okay and my cervix is still closed, so w00t. so, yeah, no real explanation as to why it feels like the baby is already trying to make its way out my vag. i guess i’m crazy, which is always the explanation when i feel weird for no apparent reason. anyway, she checked the heartbeat, too, which never ceases to bring me crazy amounts of joy. this time, sohei remarked, with no small amount of excitement, how strong it sounded. and it did, until proto-joey swam away from the doppler again. the doctor said it was a good, strong heartbeat, within the normal range, etc. also, i got my test results back and they were completely fine. i don’t have the numbers in front of me, but i think my chances were 1:10000 for downs, 1:1800ish for trisomy 18, and 1:1700ish for open defects (like spina bifida, open abdomen, etc.). i’m fine with those odds. and also, the large “screen negative” at the top of the results page.

It’s getting to be that time of year again… spring is in the air. I’m listening to all my old nostalgia-type music and re-living the beginning of my relationship with sohei. This upcoming anniversary will be number 14/7. Which means we’ve been married as long as we were dating before we got married. So from now on, we’ll have been married longer than we dated, which is weird because it seemed like such a long time. I can’t believe I could spend so much time with someone and still love them so much. But I still feel the same way about him 14 years later. It’s not like it’s been perfect the whole time or anything, of course. But I can’t imagine life without him. And I know that, in his own bear-like way, he still loves me too.

He’s been absolutely amazing through this pregnancy thing. He has gone to every appointment, every lab test, and sat with me through the entire 13-hour er ordeal. And while he worries sometimes about proto-joey (mainly that she’s not growing enough or that maybe her heart isn’t as strong as it should be, etc.) he doesn’t make me worry about it or console him. (too often.) and though he likes to play it cool most of the time, I think he gets pretty psyched about seeing her on ultrasound and hearing her heartbeat and stuff. He doesn’t seem to feel much trepidation about becoming a parent. If he does, he doesn’t tell me about it.

Sometimes I wonder how the baby’s going to change our relationship. Since – aside from the year apart – we’ve always spent most of our time together, it’ll be weird sharing the house with someone else. I mean, I’m sure I’ll get used to it pretty quickly and it won’t seem weird for long, but still… I suppose I’ll have to get used to not having his undivided attention anymore. It was my understanding that this is usually a concern for the husband, in that he’ll have to share his wife’s affections. And I don’t think I’m jealous of the baby or that I will be. But the change in relationship dynamic will probably take some getting used to.

Anyway, since we’ll be moving back to tampa on our anniversary weekend (my last day at the library is 5/14, the day after our anniversary), we’ll get to eat at our favorite restaurant and maybe visit whatever old haunts are left. Last year, near our anniversary, we were over at the lake house, which brought back so many memories. I don’t doubt that this year will be different. His old house, where we used to hang out after school every day, is next door to the lake house. Even though I know it’s totally different on the inside, and some parts of the outside have changed a little (like the dumb roof they put on), it’s still the same old house. Sometimes I wish we could buy it back some day and make it like it was and live there forever.

I know I’m rambling, but work is so boring lately. I have about a dozen projects to finish before I leave in 44 days, but I don’t feel like doing them. It’s so hard to care anymore. All I can think about is the baby and going back home. And, lately, sohei. I mean, I think about him a lot anyway, but you know how I am in the spring. I’ll be so happy when we make it back safe and sound and can focus on getting our home ready for proto-joey…

also, i forgot. it felt like proto-joey kicked me last night. again, i have no idea whether it’s really her or not, but i’ve never experienced gas that felt like it was trying to punch its way through my stomach in one little spot. of course, i’ve also never been pregnant before, and maybe pregnancy gas is just really hardcore. frankly, i think she headbutted me. a dirty little fighter, just like her mum.

some (probably) good news about proto-joey:

i had to call the nurse today about some light spotting (very light) that i had after some quality time with sohei on saturday. she said if i’m still in any pain as of tomorrow morning, to call and schedule an appointment. as i’m not in any real pain right now – just mild discomfort – i’m not all that concerned. but the good news is, i asked whether the test results from the screening were going to be mailed to me or what. and she said that, unless there’s a problem, they’ll be discussed at my next appointment. and since the results should already be there, and she didn’t say there was anything wrong, that probably means the results are within normal parameters. w00t! so, according to the crappy test that’s wrong around 10-15% of the time, proto-joey is probably okay. i know i can’t wait til i see her on ultrasound next friday. they’ll be able to determine, by looking, whether she has everything and it’s all where it’s supposed to be. also, i’m hoping she’ll show us her junk, so i can finally tell people what we’re having. (sohei has said that i’m not allowed to refer to his child’s nethers as “junk” but we all know what a classy lassie i am.)

lovelovelove proto-joey…

my pregnant coworker, who was 7-8 weeks ahead of me, is no longer pregnant. she had her baby on friday. and while the email says mother and baby are doing well, i can’t imagine how a 24-25 weeks’ gestation baby could be doing what i’d consider well. in the course of listening to the rumor mill, i’ve learned that most women who work here at the library have their babies quite prematurely. i guess it’s some kind of common curse here to have your baby before the shower. as mine is scheduled for 4/23, i’m hoping like hell that’s not the case for me. proto-joey wouldn’t be near viable by then. what the hell is it about this place that causes so many premature births?? sure, they work the staff like mules, but faculty aren’t held to the same hellish schedule, and their babies are preemies, too. i just know that the sooner i get out of this hellhole, the better i’ll feel…

i’m kind of wishing i hadn’t taken that stupid screening test last friday. because i’m pretty darn sure the baby’s just fine, and i’m also sure that the test will give a false positive and then i’ll have to deal with follow up tests and stuff, all for nothing. i’m already thinking that, even if the results are bad, i’ll just have the ultrasound and hope for the best. i’m really not wanting to do amnio anymore. i was kind of cavalier about it before, but it just feels like the baby is okay, and i don’t think i want to risk miscarriage over a stupid lab error. we’ll see, i guess. i’m not so much worried that the results are bad because there’s something wrong with the baby, like i thought i’d be. i’m more concerned now that the test is going to be completely wrong, causing me needless future worry. arg. it seems like every single decision i make is wrong.

The day you deliver, outside will be hot. Your baby will arrive in the middle of the afternoon. After a labor lasting approximately 35 hours, your child, a girl, will be born. Your baby will weigh about 5 pounds, 10 ounces, and will be 22-1/2 inches long. This child will have dark brown eyes and some black hair.

35 hours? good lord, i hope not.

i went shopping for maternity clothes for the first time yesterday. even with the belly band, my jeans are getting uncomfortably tight, in places the band can do nothing about. mainly, my butt. unfortunately, i found almost nothing in my size (wow, what a surprise), and what i did find was just awful. for one thing, the fabric was really flimsy and looked like it would fall apart after a couple washes. (also, one of the dresses was thin enough to feel a bit see-through to me.) another problem was that the couple of dresses i did find in my size were clearly designed for the small/extra small end of the spectrum, and not for women with boobs or a butt. but hey, at least they deigned to make it in my size. needless to say, i didn’t buy anything, so i guess i’ll just wear the same two skirts i’ve been wearing to work on alternating days. hopefully, i won’t get too huge until after i’m done working. then i can just sit around the house in a burlap sack or a garbage bag. i guess i figured that maternity clothes would be awesome to wear as a fat chick, since everyone gets kind of “fat”/curvy during pregnancy. wrong.

i think i might have just felt the baby! the first time i thought i felt something, a couple of weeks ago, it was kind of a very slight fluttery feeling. this time it felt like a pop! i’ve never had gas that felt like this, so i’m thinking this probably isn’t gas.

happy week 16, proto-joey!

i was lying in bed this morning, thinking about how our lives would change once the baby is born. mainly because i feel like i’m not giving it enough thought. i know it’s the sort of thing you should think about before getting pregnant, which i did, but i don’t seem to have become panicky enough at any point. i read that if you don’t feel at least somewhat nervous, you’re not being realistic or preparing yourself for what is to come. not that i am completely without nerves. i’m not looking forward to never sleeping again. i’m worried that there might be something wrong with the baby or that i might do something stupid. but i’m not really freaked out about how my life in general will change. i mean, i know i won’t be able to cuss so much. that’s going to be a hard habit to break. also, i guess i’ll kind of miss spontaneity. but once the kid is old enough, i’ll get some of that back. i don’t know, i’m just not able to get into a panic about any of it. and while i’m glad that’s one less thing for me to stress about now, i am a little concerned that i’m going to be in for a huge shock later and not be able to handle any of it. whatevs. guess i’ll cross that bridge when i come to it.

last night sohei and i were watching the episode of star trek: the next generation where troi gets pregnant by some mysterious being, etc. and they showed this embryo, with its little crook arms and black dot eyes, which made me squee with hormonal joy. “gahhhh! it’s a proto-joey!” and though my proto-joey is past this stage, i was still excited and was all, “i have one of those!” and sohei is concerned that i am rather too attached to her, when she’s so far from being born all safe and sound. but i can’t help it. i love proto-joey madly, and no amount of trying to be rational is going to change that. he doesn’t think we should call her by name, either, until she’s born. which is easy for now, of course, because i have no idea what she’s going to be. but it will probably be more difficult later.

anyway, my navel still hurts off and on. i guess i’m going to call the doctor today. i think i need to buy a couple of maternity items this weekend, because my loose pants aren’t loose anymore, and i think they’re rubbing my belly button too much. also, i thought i might have felt proto-joey move again yesterday. i first felt something a couple of weeks ago, but thought it was way too early. but the doctor said it’s completely possible. also, we know that proto-joey is a spaz, so if she’s moving around a lot, maybe i can feel it now and then. i’m waiting for a more definitive feeling before i start telling people, though. silly little proto-spaz…

i’ve been in some form of pain all weekend. i’m having this weird pain in my navel area, off and on. which then kind of runs down my abdomen into my crotchtal area. and if you’re as paranoid about stuff as i am, any kind of abdominal pain while pregnant is scary. i totally overdid it trying to pack and move stuff around yesterday, so it’s not like it’s for no reason. i’m just hoping i didn’t give myself a hernia or something. thankfully, this afternoon i’m not really having much in the way of abdominal pain. but my gums hurt like fuck, and there’s no discernible reason for it. i ate a few mini-eggs (it’s the most wonderful time of the year!) and suddenly my gums hurt. they don’t seem to be bleeding or anything, but ow. i really need to go to the dentist before i lose my dental insurance…

sorry, i know this is totally boring. i’m supposed to be getting the house ready for our move, but i’m taking it easy today in the hopes that the belly pain goes away. but i got so much done yesterday! i finished the damn loft, which is probably the most difficult part. (i think it took about three weekends.) i threw out almost ten bags of garbage, and am giving about that many to goodwill. i also got started on the bathroom, and packed all the non-essential stuff. and packed a bunch of bedroom stuff as well. oh, and some stuff in sohei’s office. so, looking at that list, i can see why i’ve been all painy for the past couple days. and i reckon i probably didn’t do any harm to proto-joey. women who work way harder than i do manage to have babies somehow.

we got to hear the heartbeat this time! i get so ecstatic when i hear it. she said it’s a good, strong heartbeat. sohei was kind of worried when we couldn’t hear it last time, and i could tell he was nervous about whether we’d hear it this time, coz he asked the doctor whether the baby could have a weak heartbeat or something. but it was fine! also, i don’t have diabetes! but i’ll have to take that long, long test again around week 26. whatevs. now i’m not nearly as worried about the neural tube defect thing. though i’m still going to the lab next week for the screening test. and i’m having a diagnostic ultrasound in april, at which i’m hoping to learn the gender of proto-joey. lovelovelove proto-joey.

it’s proto-joey appointment day! i don’t know if i’ll get to see her on ultrasound today… if they can hear the heartbeat with the doppler thingy, i probably won’t. i can never tell what i’m looking at anyway. though i will ask the doctor when we’re going to do the diagnostic, gender-detecting ultrasound, and whether i’ll get pictures. after all the ultrasounds i’ve had, i haven’t got one picture! i think the hospital has pics of proto-joey as a fetal pole, but i’m not sure it’s worth it to get those… of course, i’ll probably be sad later if i don’t have them, so i may brave the phone maze and try to get my hands on them. i’m debating how insane that would be.

aanyway, we’re approaching week 15, and all seems to be well so far. i’m really looking forward to hearing that little heartbeat today!

some people have told me, in the past week or so, that i’m showing. i didn’t really believe it at first, because there’s pretty much no way you show this early with your first. but i just looked at a gallery of bellies, and it is completely possible. so, no, it’s not just fat or bloat. woo!

also, i realized why i’m enjoying pregnancy so much. i haven’t really been depressed at all since finding out! for me, depression is pretty much a constant companion. i have even felt suicidal from time to time. but since getting pregnant, i’ve felt panicky at times, and really angry, but not depressed. the anger thing is weird, because i did tend to get angry now and then. but now i’m angry a lot more and don’t even bother trying to hide it. things that used to make me want to hide somewhere and cry now throw me into a hulk-like rage, and rather than wanting to disappear, i start chewing people the fuck out. at first, this made me feel bad, but now i’m kind of liking it. i have never, ever been this aggressive, and i imagine that i’ll become docile again once these hormones are gone… and though i never thought i’d do something like yell at a cop, it felt pretty good. since i didn’t get tased or arrested or anything. anyway, aside from the occasional panic attack and bout of hormone rage, i imagine this must be what it feels like to be kind of normal. even while on buspar, my depression didn’t completely disappear. and now it’s just not there anymore. for some reason, it took me this long to recognize its absence.

by the way, this is my favorite pregnancy calendar. i wish i’d known about it from the beginning. it may have made me slightly less panicky.

by all accounts, i’m in the second trimester now. i thought this day would never come. so unless the screening test reveals something awful, it should be mostly smooth sailing from now on. (as smooth as pregnancy can be, anyway.) i love going to all the week-by-week websites on wednesdays and seeing what proto-joey is up to. apparently, this week she’s the size of a fist. it’s kind of crazy how fast she grows… and i should be able to feel her moving around in about a month or so. i thought i felt her move just a tiny bit the other day, but there are so many weird sensations emanating from my lower abdomen, it’s more likely that it was gut-related. now that she’s probably going to stick around, i’m going to try to take the rest of the pregnancy slowly and not be in such a rush for the rest of it. i am excited about impending things like feeling her move and having a proper bump and knowing what gender she is. but it’s not accompanied by the sense of frantic urgency i’ve felt up until now. and if i get to hear her heartbeat on the doppler thingie at my appointment next tuesday, the lead-up to future appointments will also feel less manic. the appointments before were preceded with excitement but panic. what if the ultrasound showed that her heart wasn’t beating anymore? but now that things are supposed to be relatively safe for her, i’m only a little nervous about the next one. just to make sure nothing’s happened during the last couple of weeks of the first trimester, you know? i would assume that after this, i can just mostly look forward to future appointments under the assumption that of course she’s still alive in there, duh!

argggg. you know, i can put up with most pregnancy symptoms okay. i’m very, very grateful i didn’t have morning sickness to the point of actual barfing. (because that’s my least favorite thing ever.) but this itching is driving. me. nuts. i’ve been a little itchy from the start, but it’s really bad now. i got some cocoa butter/shea stuff over the weekend, and it helps some, but i don’t really want to use it at work and get it all over my work clothes. so i sit here and scratch my back until it hurts. it actually bled the other day, which has never happened to me before. scratching until i bleed, i mean. at least that’s the only place that really itches. i have this spot on my stomach that itches a lot, too, but not nearly as much. i keep reading that it’s related to stretching skin, and i get stretchmarks really easily. but none yet. (no additional ones, i should say.) just a lot of relentless itching.

sohei keeps dreaming that we have a boy. he’s only had one dream where we have a girl. strangely, i have not been dreaming about the baby at all. i’ve heard that when you’re pregnant, your dreams get really weird and you dream about the baby all the time, but i haven’t dreamed about it once. that i can remember. anyway, some people apparently think that it can be an eerie predictor of gender. or that a woman gets “feelings” about such things. personally, i’m really in the dark. i have no idea what it’s going to be. but i don’t know if that’s because it is a boy and i wanted a girl so badly that i’m blocking it out somehow. of course, i’ll love my child no matter what gender it is. but sohei keeps getting upset with me and acting like i’m going to hate the baby if it’s a boy. which i totally won’t. but we’ve been referring to our kid as “zoe” for so long, it’s just going to seem weird if it’s not zoe… on the other hand, it would probably be for the best if the baby’s a boy. we’ve been building up all these expectations for zoe all these years, without really meaning to, and that’s kind of unfair to her. for some reason, we never really thought we’d have a boy, so his slate is pretty clean, so to speak. so, because of sohei’s dreams, my complete cluelessness, and the fact that his cousin and step-sister-in-law keep having girls, i reckon we’re due for a boy. we’ll see in a couple of months, i guess, if we’re lucky.

okay, since my last two posts have been bitchy, i’ll try to write something nice for once…

i’ve been going through our stuff and throwing a lot of it out, and consolidating the rest in boxes. i thought i’d be more sentimental since i’m pregnant, but i’m actually a lot less than usual. i’ve already thrown out tons of stuff i couldn’t bear to part with during the last move. i think i’m subconsciously trying to make room for the baby or something. anyway, last night i was looking through these old boxes of letters. there’s one shoe box with my letters to sohei, and pictures and stuff, and one with his letters to me, etc. we had to write via snail mail, coz i didn’t have email during the year we spent apart. we’re both pretty humiliated by the things we wrote, but there’s no way i can throw them out. we were really, sickeningly in love, apparently. it was nice reading how he felt about me back then, and some of the adventures he had while he was away at school. and our old photos are great. we were so young! and cute! and thin! but it’s nice, too, because despite all the sarcasm and bickering, we still love each other a lot.

in other news, i’ve been reading obsessively about proto-joey again. apparently, she’s moving and joeying about in there, even if i can’t feel it yet. and growing little hairs. and producing insulin. is there anything proto-joey can’t do? it feels so good not to have to worry all the time if she’s going to make it. because chances are good now that she will. so now it’s like it’s okay to let myself get all excited and stuff. i’m really and truly going to have a joey! i am so looking forward to actually being able to feel her move around in there. i know i’m going to be sorry i said that later, but for now, i can’t wait. i keep reminding myself that i need to just enjoy this and take things as they happen, since i’m probably not going to do the pregnancy thing again. and that it’ll be over before i know it, and i’ll be kind of sad and maybe miss it a little. i’m thinking having the baby around will probably make up for it, though…

well, i’ve hit the 13 week mark. i guess that means things are probably okay? i’m still feeling a little nervous about the screening test, but not nearly to the extent i worried about losing the baby these past few weeks. just this last week, and i reckon i’ll be out of the 1st trimester. it seemed to take forever. now i’m counting down the days until the screening, then the ultrasound where we learn the gender, and of course, finally, the big day. actually, it’s just the screening and the gender determination that i’m really antsy about. other than that, i’m not in a hurry to not be pregnant anymore. i’m sure i’ll change my tune when i’m huge and uncomfortable (i mean more than usual), but for now… i guess i’ll find out at my next appointment (3/10) when i’ll be doing the bloodwork and stuff. and i know that there’s quite a wait for the results. like a week or two? then it’ll be at least another month and a half before i find out what the baby is. i bet it’ll do like b-san’s (the other pregnant lady at work) baby and refuse to cooperate. as it is, it’s impossible to see anything anyway.

it turns out that now sohei doesn’t want to announce the pregnancy because he’s afraid he’ll jinx it. i’ll let him make his own decisions. i have some of the same fears, of course, but i’m tired of worrying all the time. stupid work stuff aside, i’m going to try to enjoy this as much as i can because, despite what sohei wants, i will only be doing this once. (he’s wanting two now.)

i’m not sure whether i’ve mentioned his sympathy symptoms on here before, but sohei is definitely experiencing some. i think it’s pretty funny. he’s exhausted for no reason sometimes and he’s been really hungry. it seems like there were others, but those are the most common ones. i figure as long as he doesn’t complain more than i do about them (as if it were possible to complain more than me), it’s fine. honestly, we’re so like that in other ways, i had a feeling this would happen.

recently, he’s been a little creeped out about proto-joey’s size. he was fine when it was a tiny bean, but now that it’s around two inches long, he’s viewing it as more of a tapeworm than a fetus. and he is in turn creeping me out. (”gah! stop talking about it like that! it’s inside me!”) he says he’ll feel better when it’s actual human-size, but we’ll see.

also, i didn’t relate much of the story about the day i found out, i don’t think. so i guess i will now, before i forget. it was the day after christmas, and i was two days late. i’d been having these really bad, weird cramps on christmas eve, so i figured my period would eventually show up. in the afternoon, they got so bad that i had to lay down and took a nap until it was time to get ready for the party. still assuming that i was just late, i drank a lot that night, like i always do at the christmas eve party. then on christmas, i felt so tired all day i napped pretty much constantly. my mother in law chalked it up to having too much fun the night before, and i agreed. still cramping, no period. i had a couple chocolatinis that night, but when i went to bed and was still sans period, i started getting suspicious. and feeling kind of guilty. so the next day i insisted to sohei that i get a test while we were out and about. he thought i was being ridiculous and said if i was still worried, i could get one when we got home. but i told him i wanted to know so i could drink and go in the hot tub and stuff. so he said fine, but i’d have to pay for it if it was negative. (he thought it would be a waste of $20. but there was a sale and i got two for $10.)

anyway, genma and no-chan were napping when we got home, so i scurried to the bathroom and took the test. i watched in disbelief as two lines appeared. teary-eyed, i stood in the doorway of the bedroom and gestured to sohei to come look. he came in and looked at the test, and was like, “i don’t know what this means.” and i pointed out where it said on the stick, 2 lines = pregnant. he was eating an ice cream cone at the time and was nearly finished with it. he threw the remainder of the cone in the sink and said, “dammit!” but he didn’t mean it. he was kind of scared, because we don’t have a lot of money or anything and there’s a lot to do anyway in the next few months. but mostly he was excited. he couldn’t wait to start telling people. unfortunately, his dad took forever to wake up. so we told no-chan who woke up first. she was so happy! then we told dad, who was still half asleep, but also happy. and i called my dad and sister, but they were out bowling, so i had to wait some more before i could tell them. sohei wanted to tell everybody, but i told him i wanted to wait until the first trimester was over. which was kind of frustrating to him, and he did tell his professor/boss. but anyway, that’s the story. we went to villarta’s that night to celebrate. and everyone had drinks except me.

it’s been kind of a surprise to see how sohei’s dealt with all this so far. he’s not an emotional or particularly romantic guy, but he’s been so, so nice. the other day he got me xbox points for no apparent reason. and he does pretty much everything around the house. i’m relieved to see how he’s taking becoming a daddy.

so tomorrow is that magical day. not the last day of my first trimester, unfortunately, but close enough. apparently week 12 is when it’s generally accepted as okay to spill the beans, because your baby probably won’t die. probably. so i’m going to throw caution to the wind and tell everyone. i was going to wait until after my screening test, in case there was something really wrong with the baby and we’d have to terminate the pregnancy. but the doctor seems to think i have nothing to worry about, so whatever. and if something does happen, i’ll just tell everyone it was a late miscarriage or something. i don’t think i can wait another month. also, i’ve already told a few people, so i might as well tell the world. i’ll let sohei tell people, too, which i know will make him happy, as he’s been wanting to from the start.

also, i’ve been bored at work, so i started looking into schools and daycares back home. yeah, i’m that nuts. i’m not too wild about anything i saw, though, so i’m hoping that when proto-joey reaches the point where it’s relevant, there’ll be something i like. frankly, i’d be okay with staying home with her and homeschooling her until she’s ready to graduate, but whatevs. the other pregnant lady at work was talking about pregnancy/baby stuff, and it’s kind of neat having someone else to chat with about it. even though we’ve never been particularly friendly or anything. but i can tell she’s being nicer to me, and kind of wants someone to commiserate with. so that’s cool. i never really thought i’d be pregnant along with anyone i knew, because none of the people i work with seemed likely to have kids right now. and all my friends here are pretty much guys. she’s a couple months ahead of me, so i get kind of a sneak preview of what the next few months are going to be like.

i know that it apparently infuriates some women to hear this (according to some of the pregnancy books i’ve read, anyway), but i really like being pregnant.

this is one of the things i’m really looking forward to about having a kid. i bet we’ll have the best conversations.

the appointment went pretty well yesterday. sohei and the doctor saw the heartbeat. i couldn’t make it out, but took their word for it. the blood results were good, except for the glucose one, of course. i’ll be spending 4-5 hours at the lab on friday to take the follow-up test. the doctor didn’t seem concerned about my blood sugar or what it might have done to the baby, so i won’t be doing the birth defect screening until between 15-20 weeks. the only other kind of bad finding is that i’m not immune to chicken pox. now, see, this is yet another thing that should have come up during that preconception visit, but somehow didn’t. so instead of getting the chicken pox vaccine when i got my tetanus booster, like i should have, i am now completely vulnerable to it. hopefully i won’t be around anyone who has it, as it can cause some pretty serious harm to the baby. still, out of the long list of things on that paper that i could have had, i reckon it could have been worse. i tested negative for cystic fibrosis, thalassaemia, and all the ashkenazi jewish diseases. (some of my family were eastern european jews, so we decided to go ahead and test for those.) oh, and stds and hiv as well. but i kind of figured i’d do fine on that.

so, once again, my panic has abated for the time being. i doubt the doctor would say things are fine if they’re not. i’m still dealing with work crap, but the doctor is going to fax over yet another note, so we’ll see how that goes. at least proto-joey’s alive, and that’s all i really care about for now.

[edit:] i also forgot to mention that, despite my awful new eating habits, i didn’t gain an ounce.

okay, i know i’m writing way too much today, but this is apparently what doctor appointment days are going to be like. my mind is all racing and stuff, you know?

anyway, i was just thinking about how, before i got pregnant, i had all these grandiose ideas about how i wanted the birth to go. i wanted to do it at home, to start with. sohei vetoed that idea, as he’s certain i’m going to die in childbirth, and he’ll feel a lot less worried if we’re at least in a hospital. alrighty. so then i figured i was at least going to do it without an epidural or meds or anything. but part of having diabetes, gestational or otherwise, is an increased chance of having a c-section. so i’ve finally decided that i don’t give a damn how the baby gets out of me, as long as she’s healthy and everything. i’m not going to be all depressed because it didn’t go exactly how i would have wanted, which i was pretty sure before that i would have. it seems like the only really important thing is ultimately having the baby itself, safe and sound. so now i’m sure that i don’t care how it gets here. even if they have to cut me open to do it.

i’m going to the doctor today, and hoping to see proto-joey. i keep telling myself that she’ll be fine, and i’ll see her little heart thumping away again. we’re so close to the end of the first trimester now, i can hardly stand it. three months has never taken so long to go by. i’m still afraid my stupid diabetes may have hurt her, but i’ll cross that bridge when i come to it. gahhh i can’t wait to see you, proto-joey!

gah, i can’t stop thinking about proto-joey today. it seems like i’m so close to that magical 12 week mark. and i know anything can happen in two weeks and that anything can happen even beyond those two weeks. and that after i’m through my first trimester, i’ll spend the rest of my pregnancy fretting about wanting to just meet proto-joey already. which i do now, but i’m trying not to count my chickens, you know? but i can’t help but be excited. thanks to not having to deal with the nastier symptoms of pregnancy (getting up to pee every hour sucks, because i need to sleep, but you know), i’m actually enjoying it. and i still get excited every time i realize that i’m growing a whole person. i used to get psyched when i’d plant seeds in milk cartons in grade school and watch them sprout, and this is like that on a grander scale. i know i sound like a nut, but it’s just really thrilling. i get to help produce and grow the person i’m probably going to love most in the whole world. (next to sohei, of course.)

i’m clearly under the sway of some really powerful hormones… and sleep-deprivation…

i’m beginning to experience some of the fallout that comes from being greedy slug kangor, in that i’m outgrowing my favorite pair of jeans. in a week, i’ll be finding out exactly how much damage i’ve done. and the knowledge that proto-joey only accounts for about an ounce of it isn’t helping. it’s not that i’ll be flipping out about weight gain all of a sudden, when i haven’t really cared much for the past couple of years or so. it’s that i know the doctor will probably be flipping out about the weight gain, since she warned me at my first appointment that i should only gain about 15-20 pounds total. or the baby would be huge and i’d be endangering it or something. i can deal with being fatter. but i’d feel pretty bad if i’m hurting proto-joey. i guess if it turns out i’ve been gaining too much (i’m betting i’ve probably gained at least five pounds in the past month), i’ll have to start eating less crap. chances are, i failed the glucose test, and will probably be forced onto a diabetic diet for the duration anyway. we’ll see, i guess.

sohei seems to be enjoying the even plumper kangor, at least. i was a d or dd when this whole thing started, and i’m up to ddd now. which i don’t particularly care for, as my back was killing me to start with. but sohei’s digging the whole boobs, butt, and belly thing. i had those in spades from the get-go, but now i’m starting to resemble a certain fertility statue. whatevs. at least i don’t have to worry about feeling hideous. (i think a lot of the groping has to do with the pelvic rest i’ve been on for the past month or so, though.)

i finally got something done about work yesterday, though i still have more to do before it’s all over. what a freaking pain. sohei told me this morning about a bill that will hopefully pass, which allows for better benefits and stuff if you get fired or laid off. of particular interest to me was the fact that the government will pay around 80% of your cobra (insurance) costs. if this bill gets passed, i’m going to try to get fired.

in other news, i’m getting a little nervous about how attached i’m getting to proto-joey. i know i have an increased chance of miscarriage, and that proto-joey is far from independent viability, but i can’t help but love the little fetus. (apparently she graduated from embryo to fetus this week. and i keep calling proto-joey “she” because that’s the gender i always default to when being neutral, like when i write papers and stuff.) anyway, i’ve been doing stupid stuff like singing shine to it in the shower (i’ve been singing a lot since i found out to begin with). sometimes i talk to it. not long conversations or anything, but just asking how it is or what it wants to eat.

apparently, eating is one of proto-joey’s favorite things. here’s how my afternoons go when i get home: 1) walk in the door and pay attention to the love-starved animals, 2) go to the kitchen and make a hot dog or two (cheese-filled, of course), open a can of fruit, pour a glass of juice, and take it all upstairs to bed 3) eat the hot dog(s), the can of fruit, wash it down with the juice and sleep until around 6 or 7, then 4) wake up feeling kind of nauseous and eat dinner, which somehow makes me feel not nauseous. sohei has taken to calling me kangor because of my eating, sleeping, and moodiness. (kangor and proto-joey stem from his pet name for me, kangaroo.)

kangor was in fine fettle this morning. i was pissy, which i blame less on hormones and more on the fact that i hate my job. but it was kind of hormonally-tinged, and i found an old receipt in my hoodie pocket, and hurled it away. but, being paper, it kind of hung in the air for a second before falling pathetically to the ground. which was, of course, pretty anti-climactic and sohei started laughing at me. and it was pretty funny, so i was kind of laughing, too. but i didn’t want to be laughed at, so i punched him really hard in the arm. no laugh at kangor!

anyway, so despite getting sick (not morning sick but regular sick), i don’t think i’m losing weight this time. because, you know, i’m eating like crazy. i don’t think i’ve ever eaten like this in my life. before i got pregnant, i’d usually have a small snack when i got home, then dinner around 8:00, and that was it. i didn’t eat at work at all. now i snack at work, work through lunch, and go home an hour early every day to binge and sleep. wow, that sounds a lot like depression. except that i’m not depressed, i swear. aside from stress at work, i’m really happy. my marriage is going really well right now, and i’m over-excited about proto-joey. i just happen to be a greedy slug right now is all.

some nice things sohei’s done in the past couple of days:

-went out into the freezing cold to start my car and get the heater going
-cleaned the first floor of our house (including the kitchen, thank god)
-reads me final crisis every night
-cooks dinner most nights
-took me to the comic store and lunch
-is being very good about my absolute shit mood (i snapped at the cashier at burger king today. i’ve never done anything like that before. but stuff like that’s becoming more common…)

i spent the afternoon adding stuff to a couple of baby registries online. and, honestly, i have no idea what i actually need. there’s a list in my baby planner that i’m going by, but… it’s kind of scary realizing that i have no idea how to actually take care of a baby. the other day, we were looking at the baby aisle at the grocery store, to price things like baby food and stuff. and it dawned on me that i’m completely unaware of when you start feeding babies actual food rather than just breast feeding or whatever. i was 4 when my sister was born, and can’t remember much about how mum took care of her. thankfully, sohei was 10 when his parents started having other kids, so he remembers more than i do. honestly, though, i’m freaking clueless. i don’t know how many or what kinds of outfits a baby needs. onesies seem popular, but i just look at them and think, how on earth do you get a wiggling infant into those things? once the first trimester is over, it may be time to start reading up on this stuff.

man, i wish mum were still around. i want so badly to talk to her about everything that’s going on. i’d always kind of associated certain things with pregnancy, like morning sickness and stuff. it wasn’t until i started reading all these books on it that i realized there’s a lot more to it than that. even then, i figured a lot of it didn’t sound that bad. how bad can breasts hurt? it turns out, they can hurt pretty bad. also, i’m rather sure that i’m up to a ddd now, and while underwires are murder, i’m not sure you can get a bra in that size without one. also, would you want to? still, it seems that they hurt most at night, so i guess i’m lucky in that regard. the symptom that is really bugging the crap out of me is the constant peeing. it seems every time i finally get comfortable or get started on something, i have to get up five minutes later to pee. again. and at work it sucks because the only clean bathroom is two floors down. but i know that the minute i feel like i have to go, i’d better go do it, because i can’t risk yet another urinary infection. because the only antibiotic that even works anymore is cipro and it’s risky or whatever. i’m always kind of sleepy, so the exhaustion has been more of a nuisance than anything. besides, now i have an excuse to sleep constantly. it’s hard getting through an entire work day sometimes, though.

i will say that i am incredibly thankful that i haven’t had much in the way of morning sickness. i get queasy sometimes, and there have been a couple of times i thought i might get sick, but no actual barfing yet. i kind of figured it wouldn’t plague me too badly because my mum didn’t get sick with either of us, apparently. the worst is probably in the evening if i haven’t had enough to eat all day. sometimes i just feel nauseous no matter what. but the worst is when i’m trying to cook dinner. i made stroganoff last night, and the smell of the mushrooms about did me in. since morning sickness sounds like it’s about the worst symptom, though, i could have it a lot worse. besides, it’s a good excuse not to have to make dinner. “yeah, bear, can you cook tonight? see, i don’t want to hurl all over our meal.”

and i have to say that sohei has been fantastic. he rubs my back, cooks, cleans, takes me to appointments… yesterday, i had my first real craving. i kind of thought that whole thing was bs, because i get “cravings” for things on occasion, but mostly it consists of kind of wanting something, and if i can’t have it, whatevs. not yesterday. i suddenly wanted a mcdonalds fudge sundae and i wanted it bad. the only thing i can compare it to is when i’m severely stressed out and having a nic fit and i need a cigarette now. i have never felt that sort of need regarding food before. so i texted sohei while he was in class and told him to call me. i do this now and then when i’m not sure when he’ll be out of class and i need to ask him about something, and he calls me when he gets out. not this time. he texted back immediately, wanting to know what was up. and i texted back and told him to just call after class. so he stepped out of class a bit later and called me! he wanted to know if anything was wrong. and i said there wasn’t, and to get back to class and finish watching the film, then call me when class was out. so he called after class, and i told him i really wanted a sundae, so he went and got me one on the way home. then, later that evening, i was getting ready to take a shower, so the fan was on in the bathroom. and he came to the door and asked if i was crying. (i think i’d been blowing my nose, which i’ve been doing a lot lately, which i guess is another pregnancy symptom.) and i said i wasn’t. and after i got out, i sat down with him and said that this pregnancy is kind of bumpy, but that he can’t worry all the time. that things were going better, and he had to try to stay calm. but he is worried about me and the baby. i’m very impressed with how he’s been since this whole thing started.

okay, i am so freaking confused. depending on the source, i am either 6, 7, or 8 weeks pregnant. i guess i’ll just go with 7?

so i went to the doctor yesterday for more poking and prodding. i have to say, she’s nice enough, but her bedside manner could use some work. when i was explaining to her about the bactrim, she not only didn’t reassure me like the other doctors, but pointed out the cipro could have been dangerous as well. because, you know, i needed something else to worry about. she also found a lump on my left breast and couldn’t tell if it was a cyst or what (which i get all the time), and said i’d need an ultrasound. but she didn’t ultrasound it when she was doing the other ultrasound, and didn’t give me any kind of follow-up information on what to do about it. i refuse to worry about that, though, because i’m pretty sure it’s just another cyst. i’m supposed to go to a lab and get some bloodwork done at some point before my next appointment in a month. overall, i wasn’t terribly impressed, but i’m not actually giving birth here (thank god), so i’ll just stick with this practice until we move, i guess.

the good news is that we saw a heartbeat. sohei saw it before i did, but it was there. i think it made the whole thing seem more real to me or something. it’s weird – and kind of exciting – to think that there’s something actually living in there. unfortunately, she couldn’t date the pregnancy, and didn’t want to bother with a blood test, so i’m still unsure on that front. i’m just going to go by lmp, i guess. which means i’m at eight weeks today. i won’t find out the gender until around week 20, apparently. unless maybe i have amnio or something. boo. sohei apparently doesn’t like the name “ben” so i hope it’s a girl. otherwise, we’ll never agree on a name.

why won’t it be 2:00 already? i’m leaving at 2:00, going home to pick up sohei and some stuff i forgot, then going to the doctor. i want to see my bean! i gots to know! though i did read that in some cases, the heartbeat doesn’t even show up until the first trimester is almost over. i don’t think i can stand that. i guess we’ll have to rely on hcg levels or something. but since the er doc didn’t actually tell me what that level was, i have a feeling i won’t be finding out anything about that until the doctor’s office gets my records from the hospital. unless the level is just ridiculously low. whatevs.

look, if things go alright today, and a heartbeat is seen, i promise i will try to stop worrying so much. you know, worrying that the heartbeat was there, but the baby’s since died, etc. because i’m thinking, if all goes well today, i won’t be having another ultrasound until whenever normal people get theirs. like around week 12-14 or something. argggg the wait is killing me!

okay, you know what? fuck this. i’m just going to be happy. everyone thinks i’m crazy for being all cautious or whatever, because they’re apparently not aware that good things do not happen to me. so i will keep on getting excited about finally (finally!) having a baby. until tragedy inevitably strikes.

in other news, mi-kun asked me to come outside for a smoke break, so i told him. out of all my friends, he’s the only one i trust not to blab to anyone. (before i told him, i made him swear not to tell, and he just rolled his eyes and said, “yeah, you know how i’m always telling people everything anyway.”) also, if something bad happens, i won’t feel all weird telling him about it, because he’ll react in an alright way. and my new nerd friend (plays magic and other assorted games, loves zombies, freezepop fan, etc.), f-kun, invited me to join him and some other guys in beating each other with fake swords on sunday. and i didn’t go for obvious reasons, but i want to so badly. so i saw him today and said i was sorry i couldn’t go and he said the weather was crap so only a couple other people showed up anyway. and said they’re getting together again on sunday. and i was really tempted to just explain why i’d love to beat on people but can’t, and decided that maybe i’ll tell him if things check out tomorrow. seriously, though, i should be okay as long as i’m not crampy and bleeding and i don’t get hit in the stomach, right? who am i kidding? i will never cease to be crampy…

i will be so glad when the first trimester is over. i’m sick of the cramping and spotting and worrying. i’m also sick of wondering why things can’t ever just go right for me. it’s not like i expect pregnancy to be easy or painless, but can’t i at least be allowed to feel excited and happy that it might actually be viable for more than a couple of hours at a time? basically, my days go like this: cramp > spot > worry > cramping and spotting lessen or disappear > cautious optimism > (if i go long enough without symptoms) excitement > more cramping and spotting. at least i find out tomorrow whether there’s a heartbeat. if so, i’m apparently 95% in the clear. i’ll take what i can get.

part of what sucks about this is that i’m beginning to feel like a lot of this was for naught. sohei tries to help me feel optimistic, but it’s hard. i’m more than happy to give up smoking, caffeine (oh mountain dew and frappuccinos, how i miss you), cold cut sandwiches (damn you, listeria), and chocolatinis for a healthy pregnancy. (okay, i’m a tiny bit sad about those things.) i’d give up sleep or having a restful vacation. i’d even give up 13 hours of my life to sit around in a hospital. but the possibility that i’m cranky and exhausted and uncomfortable and deprived of some of my favorite things just kind of stings when it feels like i might not get to have a baby when all is said and done. this is probably coming across as incredibly petty, but i don’t care. i just want things to fucking go right for once. i’m sick of having to keep my guard up all the time to keep from getting hurt. if i could choose something in my life to just go right, just this once, i’m pretty sure this would be it. jesus christ, universe, give my kid a break, okay?

now i know why the er doc’s dating of my pregnancy bugged me. there’s no way i could have conceived at the time she said, because i had a uti that entire week. which means no sex. which means i think my pregnancy is going like this. (reference the ivf #1 posts). all that was seen on my ultrasound was a gestational sac that was dated a week behind what it should have been. which is also nerve-wracking, considering that my cramping started feeling slightly stabby last night. i’ll keep my appointment with the ob-gyn for next tuesday, but i sure don’t have high hopes. in fact, i’m starting to feel really fucking crushed right now.

[edit] after doing a lot of calculating – because lord knows i’m not spending my time at work, working – there is a miniscule chance that things could still be okay if the er doctor’s calculations were right. though that would mean i ovulated a week late, and my husband produces some incredibly hardy gametes.

[edit x 2] sohei has talked me down to the best of his ability, and now i am fully willing to believe that i did, indeed, get pregnant during that very small and somewhat unlikely window of time. all i can say is, it’s a good thing i wasn’t really trying, or i’d have missed the ovulation boat entirely. also, i’ll try to stop thinking about any of this until my appointment on tuesday. (not likely, but i’ll try.)

I know it was kind of crap to lay that sort of information on everybody then disappear. When I’m in Odessa, I seldom use the internet, but I’ve been back since the 30th, so there’s not much excuse. Part of it is that I don’t want this blog to become all baby all the time, but the thing is, that’s what’s been on my mind constantly for the better part of the last few weeks. And I can’t bring myself to blog on the baby blog, because I want it to be mostly positive, but things haven’t been wholly positive.

The pregnancy began with cramping. And it hasn’t really stopped. In fact, it got a bit worse. Then I started spotting, and the pain moved over to the right. I was pretty sure that this could turn out to be ectopic, so – after failing to get an appointment with any of the four ob practices in town – I went to the er yesterday. I was there from 1 pm to 2 am. That’s 13 hours, eight of them spent in the waiting room. I literally started crying by the seventh hour, because I was sure that I would never be called back. But I was, eventually, and the poking and prodding began. There was the pelvic exam, then the blood draw and i.v. insertion. After that, I couldn’t hold it anymore (my bladder was supposed to be full for the ultrasound) so I did my urine test. Then I drank half a bottle of orange soda before I was told to stop because I might need surgery and can’t drink anything. Then came the ultrasound (both kinds) on full then empty bladder. Halfway through the “empty” bladder portion, I seriously thought I was going to have an accident, so we had to stop so I could go again. Sigh.

Long story short, after five hours of tests and waiting (after the eight hours of waiting room torture), the doctor came in and said it wasn’t ectopic. My uterus just tilts to the right. No cysts or anything either. Just a weird layout. (nothing about me is normal, clearly.) she said everything seems to be fine, but that I’m actually five weeks, six days along (six weeks today, I guess) rather than the six weeks, five days I thought I was. (my ovulation apparently isn’t normal, either.) anyway, everything seemed fine, but she sent me home with documents about spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) just in case. Because, you know, cramping and spotting isn’t exactly a great thing to be doing while pregnant, and I should be prepared for the worst.

I’m actually not as worried now. I will be really sad if I miscarry, but I can deal with it. What I can’t deal with is having a part of my innards rupture, rendering me infertile and possibly dead. So now that I know that’s no longer an issue, I’m not afraid. I was worried for weeks about that bactrim I took, but everyone keeps saying it should be okay. That it was too early to do damage. If the doctor’s new estimate of how far I’m along is correct, I know I don’t really have anything to worry about. It wouldn’t have implanted if something were wrong due to the medicine. The only thing still nagging at the back of my mind is that maybe I’m right, and I am almost seven weeks along, but it only appears to be about six weeks (including no discernible heart beat) because it’s not viable and I’ll end up miscarrying anyway. But it’s not enough to wake me in a panic like the bactrim and ectopic issues. I’ll find out a week from today if everything’s alright, because I’ll be getting another ultrasound then. If there’s still no growth or heartbeat, and the pregnancy hormone levels are unchanged, then it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’ll write more about some of it later, probably, because I’m thinking that having two blogs isn’t going to work out so well.

i took a pregnancy test this afternoon after three days of intermittent cramping and no period. turns out i’m pregnant. how ’bout that. (unless something really bad or weird happens, i’ll be relegating my pregnancy posts to the baby blog.)

[relegated to private in case anyone i know might read this.]

[never mind. everyone i know who reads this blog already knows, and if someone else should find it, whatevs.]

oh, and i forgot to mention that sohei was really nice to me today while i was sick. i’m pretty sure he was just trying to impress girls, but whatevs. i had to leave work around 10:00 coz i was not feeling so hot. and when i got home, i emailed sohei coz he was in class and i couldn’t call him. i asked if he could get me some gatorade or stop at chik-fil-a to get me some chicken soup and a lemonade. then i went to bed. i called him when class got out because i couldn’t drag myself out of bed to check my email. and he said he’d stop and get me some lunch. he also said this girl told him he was a good husband for getting me soup when i was sick. he was, though. i’ve never had their soup before and it was pretty good. i ate it and went right back to sleep and slept all afternoon. he sat next to me in bed and watched tv and worked on stuff. he tried to talk to me a couple times, but since i was a mix of cranky and comatose, he just let me sleep.

yesterday, i went to this seminar at work and re-took the keirsey temperament test for the millionth time. (i love taking it, though, so it’s okay.) anyway, i got what i always do: infp, with the first three at the extreme and the last nearly borderline p/j. when i got home, i told sohei if he took it, we could maybe work on some relationship strategies. i’ve been trying to get him to take it for years, but he finally did it. he’s an intj. (i knew he’d be a j.) i don’t think our types mesh very well in certain ways. his type finds mine too emotional, for example. but apparently his type is willing to work at relationships, so there’s that.

anyway, i’m exhausted again, so i think i’m going to rest. ju-chan isn’t on her im (ahem) so there’s no point in waiting around.

i forgot i said i’d show you what i got dad for his birthday. i got him the petri dish of mad cow microbes. he’s going to put them on his desk at work. (in case you didn’t know, he’s an epidemiologist for the usda, and he’s on a task force dedicated to epidemics and emergencies like bse. once when i was visiting he got a potential bse call at like 10:00 at night, but i didn’t get to go.)

if i had an office, i’d get tons of different microbes and put them everywhere.

i got another email from nodoka. i love her. i wish she were my stepmum. i forgot to mention this last time i talked about her, but she went to the goth club sohei and i used to go to in ybor, and i thought that was pretty funny. she’s been trying to read some of the pregnancy books i’ve been reading, but they aren’t at the library near her, so she’s looking around for them. it’s neat that she’s taking such an interest. even if she’s never had kids herself, i’m glad for the support. and she’s trying to plan for our birthdays, and knowing her, it’ll be pretty awesome. i hope genma marries her soon.

in other news, i spent my weekend cleaning. the house was a pit, so we cleaned the whole thing. hopefully we can keep up with it this time. if we do, i won’t have another weekend like that until we move. still, i’m really tired today.

i guess i should get to work. i only have a week to finish this stupid project.

oh, and before i forget, i mentioned this on the baby blog, but i wanted to say it here, too. (enough commas?) anyway, sohei has been really sweet lately. ever since we decided to try for a baby, it’s like we re-entered the whole honeymoon period. there’s still teasing and stuff, of course. but we haven’t really fought at all, and it’s almost like back in the day.

the other day, he surprised me by bringing home what to expect when you’re expecting from the public library. i’d been wanting really badly to read it, but it’s always checked out. but when i got home, there it was. and he cleans the cat litter box now, too. he keeps doing these little things that surprise me. but i’m glad we’re getting along so well, because it makes this decision less nerve wracking.

happy birthday, brumby!

okay, so i finally have a chance to write about my vacation. (i was really busy yesterday, because i had to teach two classes, which may or may not be a post in and of itself.)

we set off at 9:00 on thursday night, because that’s when sohei’s car was out of the shop. we got to odessa by around 1:00 am, and were greeted by genma and his girlfriend, waiting in the driveway. genma’s girlfriend needs a nickname, i guess, as she features prominently in the vacation tale. i’ll just go with nodoka (or no-chan), which is genma’s wife’s name. so anyway, no-chan was waving sparklers about as we came up the drive, and i felt like it was a good sign.

to my surprise, we didn’t go to bed right away, but sat on the back porch and ate and chatted til after 2:00. (it may have been closer to 3:00. i don’t remember.) the next day was the 4th, and sohei’s family was coming over for a party. but not until that afternoon, so i spent most of the day in the pool or jacuzzi. and drank pina coladas. that morning, sohei left with his dad to get groceries and didn’t tell me, so i tried to keep brumby quiet and go back to sleep. he wouldn’t calm down, though, so no-chan came to the door and discreetly let him out, thinking i was still sleeping. i dragged myself out of bed and she gave me a danish and we talked for a while. she’s a family friend, so she knows things that even i don’t know about genma after 13 years. which, really, was okay with me, but i can tell she’s still trying to get a feel for who he is. and i can tell also that some people are gossips and don’t really know what they’re talking about, so it was also good to set the record straight on things i did know.

anyway, the party was fun. sohei’s aunt and uncle were there, and his cousins, who are older than we are. and the cousins’ kids, including the one who was a baby last time i saw her and is a toddler now. auntie and no-chan got into it a bit over politics, which i’d been trying to avoid. because i’m pretty darn leftist and no-chan pretty darn isn’t. brumby was really good, and he didn’t knock the kid over even when she had food in her hand, which we were relieved about. (we worry that he won’t get along with zoe.)

the rest of the weekend was much the same. we ate a lot, drank too much, swam, rode around on the boat, etc. we even got to drive around in the convertible and went to greektown. no-chan and i talked a lot when the guys weren’t around. she told me genma said that, since things didn’t work out with his daughter, he was glad he has me as a daughter. i always kind of figured as much, but it was nice he said so. she was a really excellent hostess, too. on saturday, she kept making these really good pina coladas, and i don’t usually care much for them, but she used actual pineapple and coconut and everything. i felt kind of guilty watching her do everything all weekend, but genma says she’s just hyper and that’s the way she is.

one of my favorite things to do, though, was lounge on the giant white sofa in the living room and stare out the windows at the lake. i would lie there and kind of read, but mostly looked out the windows. there’s a double set of glass doors, so you can see a lot. and it was nice watching storms come in. i think that spot’s replaced the usf st. pete library as my favorite place in the whole world. genma and sohei grew up in that house – or spent a lot of time there, anyway – so i don’t think they understood the appeal. i have some not very good pictures on my phone, which i’ll upload here at some point. we’re taking the video camera next time, so i’ll be able to hopefully get better stills from that.

i guess there wasn’t so much to say because i didn’t really do anything. but that’s what made it such a great vacation. and all it cost us was gas money. (and since genma gave sohei a new computer and generous “loan” it pretty much covered that and then some.) i will admit, though, that for the first time in my life, i wished i had $1 million. i don’t care much about money or stuff, but i wanted that house a ridiculous amount. (it was built in ‘71 and is really retro, but that’s what makes it so cool. that and it’s the house sohei’s grandparents built.) no-chan had been trying to sell it for $1.2 million, but thankfully changed her mind when she and genma started dating. if, for some reason, i ever have that much money, i’ll buy that house. i can’t think of anything i’d rather spend it on… at least we can enjoy it until genma screws things up and she dumps him and sells the house.

i don’t think i’ll ever stop missing my mum. the recent graduating stuff really brought back her memory. i will always attribute my academic success and my choice of career path to her. for most of my school career, i didn’t care about my grades. when i finished my a.a., i was stuck for a couple years. i didn’t know what i wanted to do, and i couldn’t find work. after being housebound for over a year, i pretty much literally lost my mind, and sohei took me to stay with my parents for a few months. while there, mum fixed me up. she found me a potential career to work toward, helped me get medical attention, and got me ready for my upcoming wedding. if she hadn’t helped me then, i don’t know where i’d be today. dead or institutionalized, probably.

when i came back from gainesville, i got married and started working at the comic book store. i was only there a few months before i quit, but then i got to go back to school. with a plan for the future, i worked really hard to get good grades to make her proud. (and also so she wouldn’t be sorry she was paying for my education.) she died before i got my b.a. in english lit, though. my grades that semester suffered, of course. but, despite wanting to just give up and join her, i worked. it was all there was to do, and i didn’t want to waste the time and effort she’d put in to get me this far. and then i went to grad school for my library degree, like she’d suggested. and i still wanted to call her every time i got my grades back. i wish she could see what i’ve become…

yesterday, i wrote to an old colleague of hers to ask for a reference for a job i’m applying for. (it’s a digital librarian job over at the medical library.) he wrote back straight away and said he’d be happy to help. and that everyone there still thought about my mum a lot, and it was nice to hear from me. i’d only worked at that library for the couple of months i’d spent back home that time, and was only a temp, but the branch manager is willing to be a reference for me. because of how much they love and respect my mum there, mostly, i reckon. (t-sensei told me once that library folk are stingy with their references because it’s such a small community. he only gives references for people he believes in, for the sake of his own reputation. with that in mind, references from librarians mean a lot to me.)

sometimes i feel like i have a lot to live up to. mum spent a lot of her life raising me and my sister. we were her career. i am what she has to show for all those years spent at home. it’s a lot of pressure sometimes. wasting my own life is one thing, but she invested a lot of hers in mine as well. i wasn’t always what she wanted, but i feel compelled to make the most of myself now, for her. it’s the least i can do for all the doors she opened for me. and anything else just seems disrespectful…

boy, it’s been damn good times. i came home from work today, and neko approached me like she always does, to say hi. and i noticed her eye was swollen shut, with this big, red inflamed area over it. i flipped out and called the vet, and they said we could drop her off, but they weren’t taking any more appointments. we went anyway, and they ended up seeing her. apparently, she’s having a severe allergic reaction to something in the air or something she’s eating, and she’s been scratching herself raw. i saw scratches on her ear and forehead the other day, but they didn’t look bad, and it seemed like maybe brumby scratched her when they were roughhousing. anyway, they gave her a shot, and i’m supposed to go get her some new food. which i’ll be doing as soon as traffic thins out a bit. she was looking better at the vet, and could open her eye, but now that she’s home, it’s all closed again. i suspect it’s because this house is a dusty mess. it seems like no matter how much we dust or vacuum, it stays the same. i’m definitely going to make more of an effort, though, because my baby is obviously suffering. poor neko. she hates going to the vet, but at least she was slightly better behaved this time. which is to say she didn’t fly in the air and spin around and turn her head 360 degrees. like she did at the old vet. she seems to like this place slightly more. the old vet hated her, though, and i reckon she knew it.

i’d better go vacuum and clean her food dishes, though. she probably needs some affection, too. poor baby.

i got yet another piece of ignorant email from my grandma and her husband, warning me that welfare and subsidy programs are the reason we’re losing our freedoms. i mean, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with warrantless wiretapping or any of the other things the bush administration is doing… i wish they’d quit forwarding me this shit, like i asked them to before. it just pisses me off, and then there’s nothing i can do about it, because i can’t rant at them. and it’s pointless to try to set them straight. so i’m left to seethe with impotent rage that people could still be so ignorant, and that my relatives are part of what’s wrong with this stupid country.

[edited. a lot.]

i’m in the subbasement, listening to my mp3 player, which has some music from marmalade boy on it. i feel wistful even during the songs that aren’t supposed to make me feel that way… it reminds me of the couple of months i went back home to live with my family before i got married. i never really thought about it, but it was kind of my last shout, as it were. it was the last time i really felt like a kid. and didn’t feel like that was wrong somehow. i have the first gorillaz album on here as well, which i also listened to quite a bit at the time. the reason i went home to begin with (i went crazy and got really sick and couldn’t take proper care of myself) kind of sucked, but once i was home, i started getting better under mum’s watchful eye. so some of that time was bad, but i still have a lot of bittersweet memories.

for one thing, it was the last long stretch of time i got to spend with mum. and she took really good care of me. she took me to the doctor and bought my meds and got me a job with her at the library (where i discovered what i wanted to do for the rest of my life.) she helped me get all the wedding and reception stuff done. we fought of course, but i remember the good things better, even when it was little things like standing around with her while she smoked in the garage. i guess that was the last real mothering i got. so i feel kind of sad about it. it’s one of those times i’d like to go back to, if i could.

and there was other stuff, like eating junk food with juchan and watching all her marmalade boy tapes (all of them) and going neat places together and everything. it was also the last time i got to live with her at home. and we also fought, but, again, i mostly remember the good parts best. and she’d put up with me pining for sohei and crying whenever the nachan/meiko theme came on, etc.

then there was spending time with dad, which was nice, coz i don’t think we fought at all. we don’t usually, anyway. he was trying to quit smoking, so we went on a walk every night after dinner. the smell of nicotine gum always brings me right back to those evenings. and i went to work with him a couple times and read his epidemiology books and we had lunch and stuff. i guess it doesn’t seem like dad and i ever do much, but we’ve always kind of enjoyed just being. which is why we probably used to like fishing so much, just standing there saying little. we’re boring like that.

and i also got to go to a movie and spend some time with my old best friend, and it was kind of the last time we really hung out. it seems like i was saying goodbye to a lot of things without really realizing it at the time. it was when i can actually pinpoint the last time in my life that i was a child. when my parents were taking care of me and i didn’t have to worry about anything but getting well and having fun. and have fun i did. (i’m really glad i’m alone in the subbasement, coz i feel like i could cry at any minute.)

i didn’t realize that was all bottled up like that. i mean, i knew i had the memories and that they were good, but i didn’t understand how significant that time was to me. hindsight, i guess. i’ll just add it to the list of times i wish i could freeze and stay in forever. after all, without mum, i can never re-live it, and things will never be the same, anyway. time sucks.

happy 30th, sohei.

- you know what i love about sohei? his hair is naturally black. i love black hair, and he would never be willing to dye it, so i’m glad it’s that way anyway. (but if he dyed the tips blue, it would make me even happier. he should also get an eyebrow piercing.)

- i also love that he’s smart, but not so smart that he’s smarter than me. i think we’re about the same, smart-wise. this is good, because i freaking hate it when someone is patronizing to me, but i’d also hate to have to dumb myself down for him.

- and i love how he’s so talented at so many things, even if he’s more so than me. (i can handle someone being more talented, but not smarter.) he can write and play music and draw, among other things. he’s also going to be a very good lawyer.

- and i absolutely lurrrve how he’s not obsessed with sports or other stupid crap i don’t care about. he likes soccer, which is a good sport to like, but could take or leave the rest of it. yay for that, i say.

- i also love how we have similar taste, so we don’t have to fight over stupid furniture or what kind of house to buy or what to paint the kitchen. (apparently, we’ve both unanimously decided that we’re too lazy to paint anything.)

i dunno. i’m bored at work today, what with having no work to do…

dammit, i miss sohei, the little hottie.

sprockets!

why is it that just about every time i go to write something positive on here, something shitty happens?

juchan just imed me to let me know that she has a tumor. it may be basal cell carcinoma, between her nose and eye. after the surgeon butchered her damn jaw, i’m not sure i trust anyone there to operate on her face. i don’t even know what to think right now. and i guess i don’t feel like talking about it. i don’t even know whether it would help anything, but i just wish she’d come home.

my sister’s fine. she just imed me. just so you know.

i don’t believe in god, so i don’t pray, and i don’t ask anyone else to, either. but i’m asking you guys to think good thoughts, because that usually seems to work pretty well, and i don’t know what else to do right now.

i was chatting with my sister on aim last night when she discovered something about her boyfriend. it’s personal, so i’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but she got very upset. she packed up her stuff and left him. she doesn’t have any money or anywhere to stay, so i don’t know where she went. i have no way of contacting her except via internet (email, im). i’m really, really scared for her. she’s in mexico, she’s not entirely fluent in spanish, and she has nothing. anything could’ve happened to her, and i have no way of knowing. i don’t know how to contact her boyfriend or his family. there is literally nothing i can do. i will let you guys know as soon as i hear from her, but in the meantime, please keep her in your thoughts. i know what she did can only be described as stupid, but i just want her home safe right now.

i’m soooo glad sohei and brumby are coming home tomorrow. love love love sohei. he got straight a’s this semester and booked two classes again. (got the highest grade, in other words.) he’s so hot and smart and fun. and he’s mine! alllll miiiinnnnneeeee! i know this is ridiculous and disgusting, but i can’t wait for him to be here.

i’m going to miss you this summer, but it’ll be nothing like our first year together, spent apart. this has been a hectic year, with a lot of changes, but we got through it like we always do. it’s hard to believe it’s been over a decade since we first decided to give this relationship thing a shot. and five years since we threw our principles out the window and went down to the courthouse to sign that piece of paper. and despite the problems and hard times, i’d do it all over again. i still love you as much as i did on that day in the mall parking lot, 12 years ago. happy anniversary, sohei.

dad visited today. he was in tallahassee for work and will be in orlando on friday for julie’s graduation. i haven’t seen him in over a year. in some ways, it’s almost more difficult to see people rarely than not at all. not that i didn’t enjoy our visit, because i did. there were no fights or tension. it’s just that, for me anyway, when i’m away from people, i remember them like they’re frozen in time. mostly, nowadays, i remember gainesville family. but that was some time ago. and whenever i see our folks, i feel this initial shock at how much older they look. and then i get thrown into this stupid panic. i should have a kid by now. my mum was pregnant with me when she was my age! sohei’s mum was pregnant with him at my age! what if we’re waiting too long? it already kills me that my mum will never meet her grandchild and vice versa. i mean, it’s not like our parents look like they’re at death’s door, but it’s hard watching people grow old when, somewhere in your mind, they’re 15 years or so younger.

and i remember how much i really miss my dad.

juchan! (i assume that’s you reading my blog, from mexico.) i miss you! and i dreamt that i was yelling at you and you turned out to be dead, and i felt awful, and when i woke up i was worried. because i always have nightmares while you’re there. but you’re alive and reading my stupid, crazy blog. w00t.

<3

i have been writing lately, believe it or not, but it almost never actually makes it to my blog. i don’t know why, then, that some of it does. it should either work or not. whatever. i haven’t found a way to blog from work without it being a pain in the ass, so i’ll probably just write there and email it to myself, and post it when i get home. or something.

work has been really good. the people there are so unbelievably nice. i’m kind of making friends, and it’s neat. and, except for calling people (which is fast becoming a large part of my job), i like the work. i have trouble calling friends and family members. calling strangers that might be busy or pissy can be downright scary. but i keep doing it, because i think i’ll get used to it. and, if i didn’t do it, i’d have to quit my job. but my boss sent me an instant message saying i was doing a good job on the phone, so i’ll just go with that.

i talked to my sister for a while today. which is nice, coz we just don’t have time anymore. but she mentioned that when our grandma called the other day, she was kind of upset. i don’t remember whether i talked about it on here, but right after i moved here, i accidentally told her about dad’s new family. and i guess she didn’t know. and maybe i wasn’t supposed to tell. i don’t know. but she acted like it didn’t bother her, so i assumed she was fine. she called while i was at work the other day, and i talked for a couple minutes but told her i was at work, and she said she’d call later. and didn’t. so, even though dad should have told her to begin with, i’m feeling guilty because i’m the one that said something and now she’s upset. maybe dad was right and we shouldn’t have said anything. i don’t know. but i was supposed to tell dad i told her so he could talk to her about it, and i’ve been avoiding it. i don’t really feel like getting into a fight about it. but i feel like a selfish asshole because apparently this has really been bothering her and she doesn’t want to talk to him until he knows she knows. i don’t know how i end up stuck in the middle of everything all the time. i just feel really bad for her. so i tried to call dad but he wasn’t available so i left a message. he’s out of town on business, so i felt pretty shitty about just leaving a message like that on his cell. but i’m sick of this weighing on my conscience, and had no idea until today how upset my grandma is.

i was going to talk about how great work is going, but now i just feel like shit.

i just wanted to point out that sohei has been a pretty damn good bear lately.

that is all.

happy 1st birthday, brumby!

my cousin-in-law had her first baby last night, around 7:30. i don’t know when we’re going to see her, because i know that the first days (weeks? months?) are overwhelming, and i don’t want to bother them. but i reckon we’ll go see the baby before we move.

welcome to the planet earth, kili. with folks like yours, it won’t be all bad. even though your mum listened to “my humps” the whole time she was pregnant with you.

happy 11th/4th anniversary to… us! on a saturday afternoon much like this one, 11 years ago, sohei and i started “going steady.”

and i’m still too tired to think of anything significant to say about it.

i just thought i’d point out how nice sohei has been about taking care of me for the past week. he’s been getting progressively happier lately. it started with getting a dog, who is really his best friend. then i got a job and my license. then he decided where to go to school, and he’s so excited about it, he wants to leave now. so, thanks to a major mood improvement, he’s been doing a lot for me while i’ve been laid up. he fetches treats for me, like lattes and ice cream and stuff. he’s been to taco bell twice, which he hates, but the soft tortillas are easier for me to eat than bread. he’s been taking me to my appointments, and has generally been nice to be around lately.

just thought i’d say so.

happy birthday, mum.

i realize i never really talked about what happened over the holiday. so here it is, as far as i can remember:

up until the 23rd, i basically set up all the christmas stuff, cleaned the house, etc. on the 23rd, i got my hair cut and dyed, and juchan and gavin arrived. i think. and i don’t remember what the heck we did on christmas eve. except the party. we all went to the annual sohei’s family shindig, but it felt really different this year. i think a lot of that had to do with the fact that my family was there (dad, wife, juchan, and gavin.) but aside from that, it seemed short. juchan and i got, well, tipsy, and had a pretty good time. it makes me sad to think we may not be here for it next year.

on christmas, i was pretty much in the kitchen all day. no kidding. dinner turned out awesome and i got some good gifts. dad got me the nintendo ds i wanted, and nintendogs lab version. sohei got me lots of neat books, including some buddhist children’s books. not because i’m dumb, but because the illustrations were beautiful and i want them for zoe. juchan got my bratz baby some really cute clothes, and my father-in-law gave me an mp3 player. i basically cooked, ate, and slept that day.

the next day was juchan’s birthday, so to the mall we went. if it hadn’t been her birthday, i totally wouldn’t have gone, but since it was, i wanted her to have a nice day. we got her some designer deodorant she wanted and a victoria’s secret gift card. i don’t remember a lot about that, either, except that i got this really nasty blister on my heel and gavin let me borrow his sandals/flip-flops/whatever. which were huge and i could hardly walk in, but they were really comfortable. we ate at the cuban restaurant near my house, for dinner, per juchan’s request. it was damn good. then dad and wife went back to their hotel, and left the next day.

on the 27th, sohei, juchan, gavin, and i went to the zoo. it was fun, as usual. then we all came home, and they were going to leave after gavin got up from his nap. juchan and i had a fight (or, more specifically, i said something that offended her, and when she started yelling at me, chris started yelling at her) and they left then.

and i pretty much vegged the rest of the time. oh, and we went to my mother-in-law’s on new year’s day for the traditional good luck meal. she got me a new outfit and some cookbooks, and grandma gave me a card she had received in – i think – the 50s from japan. it was framed and everything, and it was so, so cool. and she gave me some asian knick-knacks as well. i think, at this point, that i have been given just about everything of asian origin on both sides of sohei’s family. (my family never visited asia or anything, so we don’t have that kind of stuff.)

so it was a nice holiday, for the most part. even though my family is insane.

i went on myspace today for the first time in a while, only to find that my sister has unfriended me, but not a friend of hers that she had learned was basically a nazi.

so, for those of you keeping score:

gish < nazi

gish: though a relative, unacceptable
nazi: though an intolerant moron, is still needed for homework help (or some other excuse), acceptable

i could go on, but what’s the point?

by the way, while this sort of thing is typically private post territory, it sounds like she’s already been talking about me to her friends, so i’m not going to bother with trying to keep this debacle private. especially since i have nothing to be embarrassed about, and i was only trying to spare her feelings and save face on her behalf.

despite being so tired yesterday, i still couldn’t sleep again last night. so now i’m really, really tired. i’m just going to go ahead and take a nap, since i can’t seem to sleep at night no matter what.

it feels like there’s a lot i want to talk about, but my brain’s not working. and a lot of it is just kind of depressing, and i’m actually not too depressed otherwise, so i don’t want to get into it.

and i know i’m totally jinxing things, but sohei has been so nice to me since the holidays. i think he mostly feels sorry for me, but time around my family always seems to have that effect on him. at any rate, i’m actually enjoying spending time with him, which for a while i wasn’t. but i am now, so it’s okay.

yeah, i need to go to bed now.